University Hospitals Coventry & Warwickshire NHS Trust

PCTI, the leading provider of electronic document management and transfer solutions has delivered EDT Hub to University Hospitals Coventry & Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust to transfer electronic documents to GPs.

University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust required a solution to deliver documents to GP practices in a timely manner. The end-to-end solution enables the effective transfer of electronic documents to improve patient care, reduce processes performed by healthcare professionals and provide significant cost savings.

The Trust is currently using the solution to send up to 5,000 documents electronically each week to 52 GP practices, with a planned roll-out to some 170 practices across Coventry and Warwickshire during the year. This represents significant cost savings by removing many processes such as the need to print and post documents to practices. Documents arrive at the GP practice well within the desired timescales, saving the practice up to 1 minute per document by removing the need to open letters, scan and manually file letters.

Documents are delivered into the practices into an electronic workflow that identifies the key information within the document and attaches it to the appropriate patient record.  This in turn enables the patient’s document to be instantly available anywhere in the practice and removes many manual processes. As a result the practice has access to an up-to-date record of their patients.

By sending documents securely using EDT Hub, UHCW can track when they are received by the GP practice, which ensures patient safety with the knowledge that every document has been safely transferred and received.

Charles Yeomanson, Associate Director of ICT, University Hospitals Coventry & Warwickshire NHS Trust is leading the transformation of electronic communications across the Local Health Community. “The deployment of EDT Hub is part of the Trust’s strategy of process change to drive down costs. Working with the Coventry IT Collaborative the solution has already been deployed to GP Practices across Coventry and is enabling letters to be sent to GPs within minutes of being produced electronically by the Trust’s Digital Dictation system.”

Charles added “the system ticks all of the QIPP boxes for both Trust and GP's alike but, more importantly, it is helping to deliver safe and effective patient care. Once rolled-out, the intention is to turn off the printing of 500,000 letters that are sent to GP practices across Coventry and Warwickshire each year. The next step will be to enable referral letters from GP systems to be imported directly into the Trust’s Electronic Patient Record.”

Ric Thompson, Managing Director, PCTI “EDT Hub is transforming the foundations of clinical communication between Primary and Secondary care. Our EDT Hub deployments are delivering against real efficiency targets as set out in the QIPP guide.  With over 30 Trusts using our solution to send electronic documents to primary care, many are now waiting for the soon to be released multi-directional capability which will have a massive impact on the outcomes for improved patient care.  Our new multi-directional EDT Hub's will provide an exciting opportunity to really start to join up health and social care.”

For more information about EDT Hub please see www.pcti.co.uk/edthub