TPP -News Archives -23 February 2007

23 February 2007 500th GP Practice Goes Live on SystmOne!

The vision of sharing one patient, one record is taking shape at StowHealth Centre which highlighted its commitment to putting customers first at the doctor’s surgery when it became the 500th practice to go live with SystmOne GP, the integrated GP system being delivered by the CSC Alliance for Connecting for Health.

The Stowmarket practice yesterday demonstrated the versatility of SystmOne GP which supports clinical and administrative staff to put patients at the heart of healthcare.

SystmOne GP, delivered after extensive consultation with GPs, speeds up and integrates healthcare, from booking convenient On the Day examinations after a telephone consultation with a duty doctor, to helping to reduce waiting times for routine scheduled appointments by allowing automated patient check-in.

The new GP system offers a broad base of clinical care for the 15,500 patients of the StowHealth Centre based in Stowmarket, Suffolk and offers a glimpse into the future for GP surgeries nationwide. The SystmOne Child Health system allows clinical staff to monitor child immunisation plans and schedule regular health checks, while SystmOne Community means district nurses at community sites in Suffolk can notify GPs in real-time if a patient has been accepted on their caseload and even the actual time spent on treatment.

More importantly, GPs at StowHealth realised that the proven technology and integration of SystmOne, used effectively within the National Programme for IT framework, puts patients’ needs first.

Dr Mark Shenton, one of nine GP partners at the Stowmarket practice, said: “We had been a paperless surgery for six years. We have moved forward again by choosing SystmOne GP ahead of updating our existing system because it will integrate with the government’s National Programme for IT.

“The potential of this system is fantastic. Around one million consultations were transferred to our new system without a hitch. We had a team to oversee this and were committed to training. Our staff should take credit for making it work.”

Dr Neil Macey, who helped lead the transition to the new system said: “The information you can call up on the patient record is astonishing. We have templates for asthma sufferers to identify and analyse patient history or can develop our own to help diagnosis, using diagrams and cross referencing.”

The Stowmarket practice, which employs 60 staff, has used the GP system to redesign their patient management system for the award-winning Long Term Condition Clinic. Here patients are equal partners in healthcare decisions, services are user-friendly – there’s even a blood pressure monitor and scales in the waiting room – while access to the surgery is more convenient.

Dr Shenton said: “Patients were coming back three or four times a year for hypertension, heart disease, diabetes or lung problems. These long-term conditions involved countless blood and cholesterol tests on separate visits. We identified 3,300 had 4,500 conditions and cut visits by 20 per cent. Patients are happy with a more personalised service.”

Patients can also ring up for an On the Day Appointment or a referral or they can book scheduled appointments online at a later date where they can check themselves in at the surgery. Some 40 per cent of patients to be dealt with over the telephone, reducing waiting times and traffic, while the StowHealth website has increased by 20 per cent in 12 months.

Wendy Denny, Practice Manager, said: “We’ve had 39,000 unique visits to the site so far this year with more than 100,000 pages viewed by users. We’ve also received 9,000 repeat prescription requests from the site. Feedback on the routine appointment check-in kiosks has been very good, especially from the older patients.”

By 2013, the £12.4 billion NPfIT will connect more than 30,000 GPs in England to almost 300 hospitals and give patients access to their personal healthcare information, transforming the way the NHS works.

The new GP system has even more potential using practice-based commissioning in a shared clinical environment, according to Dr Shenton, who is committed to giving patients treatment where and when they need it.

He said: “We will soon by sharing patient records with neighbouring surgeries. This system allows this integration, the sharing of clinical information on screen in real-time. It allows us to do it quickly and we are not waiting for a pile of papers on patients to arrive from another hospital or community clinic. These changes benefit everyone.”