"Qute beats any commissioning-related software I have seen"

Dr Arun Aggarwal who has been piloting Qute for six months at the Rainbow Surgery in Huntingdon explains the benefits that he believes the software promises.

Here in Huntingdon, like many other areas of the country, our local PCT has been asking us for a while now to inspect the bills from hospital trusts to verify hospital events with our own records of referrals and hospital letters for patients.

Unlike many areas we did have some systems in place to help us to do this, but doing it manually was very tedious, and took up a lot of my time and that of my non-clinical staff. In the beginning, each month we would get two sets of tables from the PCT showing all the inpatient and outpatient activity that the hospitals said had happened and we would be asked to verify this. We made some improvements to speed up the work and reduce the volume, but nothing came close to what Qute is now able to offer us.

Crucially, Qute offers more than simply a way to check the bills. With the help of the complex searches and reports it can produce, GPs are able to identify the different pathways by which patients with the same condition end up at different hospitals or with different consultants – and the varying associated costs. It empowers GPs as commissioners to challenge pathways that they consider inefficient and ineffective.

Qute is also really useful for patients who are being seen by different specialists for multiple conditions. You can now use Qute to single out all events relating to a particular problem. So if for example you just want all events relating to an abdominal condition, Qute can instantly show you those, along with all of the related inpatient and outpatient information, showing the hospital coder’s interpretation of what happened and what the bill was.

Qute beats anything else that I have seen in commissioning-related software and it’s even better than I expected when we first set out our vision to Dr David Stables, EMIS co-founder and clinical director. Throughout the project, pilot surgeries had input into how the software was developed and EMIS was very responsive to our suggestions.

Ultimately it will save practices time and money spent on verifying bills. Under PBC, if PCTs offer incentive schemes to GPs to inspect billing and reduce referral costs, Qute will help them to do that.

Finally, Qute has the potential to make hospital trusts realise that they have to take due care in how they present HRGs (health resource groups) and bills, because there will be an easier and quicker way of checking them from now on.