After a patient is declared fit to leave hospital there’s a whole host of things that need to happen before they can actually go home and delays can be caused by numerous things such as waiting for prescriptions, transport or care packages.
Our pharmacy and IT teams have come up with a way to save doctors thousands of hours a year, which may also reduce the length of time patients are waiting to be discharged.
An interface has been created between two existing computer systems which is saving doctors around 20 minutes per patient; resulting in more than a thousand hours freed up already for doctors at Scunthorpe and Goole hospitals, with the interface planned to go live at Grimsby hospital in September.
WebV is a bespoke inhouse EPR (electronic patient record) system which was designed for and with clinicians. It allows staff to see at a glance all the patients on a ward, which consultant they are under and whether they have any specific needs eg nutrition, dementia, or if they are at risk from falls. You can request diagnostic tests, record observations from the bedside as well as a multitude of other functions to capture aspects of the patients care digitally. It’s also the system used by doctors to complete the discharge paperwork, which has to be done before a patient can leave hospital.
The trust also has an electronic prescribing and medicines administrations system (ePMA) which doctors use to prescribe medication and nurses use to administer from.
Last year work was undertaken to link the two systems together so doctors could pull the patient’s medication list straight from ePMA into WebV – saving approximately 20 minutes time per patient being discharged. Prior to this they had to look up the information on ePMA and then type the medication in manually on WebV, which as well as taking longer, could potentially lead to typing errors, resulting in inaccurate information being sent to GP’s.
Paulash Haider, Assistant Chief Pharmacist, said: “Introducing ePMA has already reduced the number of medication errors at the Trust. By taking advantage of the accuracy provided, having this ability to pass this across to the WebV discharge summary gives us the assurance that GP’s will get more accurate information and will also mean the list of medication on the discharge summaries will no longer require corrections and multiple amendments. By working with our colleagues in IT and WebV, we have been able to create a more streamlined process to benefit patients, doctors and GPs.”
FY1 Doctor Eman Hasan said: “ePMA is such a practical way of seeing the complete medications list for patients, allergy statuses, doses, timings, whether it has been given and if not the reason why. Having this at a moment’s notice makes our ward rounds so much easier. It also saves us having to decipher any illegible writing on paper prescription charts too.
“Thanks to the integration with WebV it’s now easy and straightforward to do discharges. Instead of copying medications one by one, you can easily select all the medications from the patients ePMA file and mark these to be continued. This was a huge undertaking especially when patients have a big prescription list! I really like how the joint interface displays changes that have been made to medications during admission, for example if they have been discontinued. I find it very practical to use and allows for clearer communication and a much safer handover of care back to the community.”
