An urgent care centre (UCC) in a deprived part of east London is meeting national targets to prevent admissions to A&E, with the help of state-of-the-art technology from EMIS. The centre, attached to the A&E department at Newham Hospital, part of East London NHS Foundation Trust, is using the company's transformational clinical system EMIS Web to care for over 70,000 patients a year and prevent avoidable A&E admissions. Since taking delivery of EMIS Web two months ago, it has already surpassed a target to stream no more than a quarter of patients to A&E, thanks to two-way record sharing with local GPs.
Associate Medical Director Kate Corlett said: "The big win for us has been having access to vital information held in the GP records, so that we can provide more informed, efficient care to walk-in patients. We can see the complete record, with point of care consent from the patient, and the GPs can see from our notes what care we have given their patients. The clinicians at the hospital love it."
The UCC's team of local out-of-hours GPs, emergency nurse practitioners and self-care assistants assess all incoming patients except for ‘blue light’ stretcher cases. Patients are then streamed back to their own GP, to a minor injury/illness unit within the centre, or on to A&E for emergency care.
"For a variety of reasons, some parts of the inner city population can find GP care difficult to access, which has meant increased emergency department visits," said Dr Corlett. "We have a national key performance indicator (KPI) to stream no more than 26% of our patients through to A&E, and we are actually achieving 20%."
"EMIS Web is a lovely clinical system. It’s easy to use and I think it is already a success for the UCC. We have taken significant amounts of work off the emergency department."
Local GP Dr Bhupinder Kohli said: "This project has been for me the most significant IT event for the last 10 years. It is improving clinical care and patient safety, and saving time. As well as supporting vulnerable patients who often do not know their full medical history, we can also educate them on how to best use their own GP practice."
Martin Bell, Director of Community, Children's and Mental Health at EMIS said: "We are delighted that EMIS Web is helping the team at Newham Hospital to meet these important KPIs from the Department of Health. EMIS Group's 'connect all' strategy is enabling clinicians in the NHS to drive up efficiency and improve patient care and East London is a first-class example."
Related news articles:
- EMIS' Profile
About EMIS
EMIS is part of EMIS Group - the UK leader in connected healthcare software and services. EMIS systems hold over 40 million patient records and are used by nearly 6,000 healthcare organisations - from GP practices to community, child and mental health services. 52.4% of GP practices in the UK use an EMIS system.