Reducing the validation burden
For practice manager Julie Faller at the Cedar House surgery in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, the process of validating hospital episode data with the practice’s referral record was, in her words, “time consuming, detailed and boring.”
Even with Anglia Support Partnership’s excellent Quebec programme – which puts practices in Huntingdonshire at an advantage to many areas of the country– reconciling secondary care data with the data on the surgery’s EMIS system was a huge challenge.
“The fact is we are going to get asked to do more and more of this kind of work as Practice Based Commissioning develops,” says Julie. “So it’s vital we have the tools to do it – and until recently we just haven’t.
“For example if you were asked to validate your top 20 spends by the PCT, it would take two to three days for a fairly expert member of staff to interrogate the data. Trying to find episodes was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”
Qute – the programme that Julie’s practice has been piloting for the last nine months – now enables staff to carry out such tasks in a fraction of the time, as well as carrying out a range of detailed searches and reports.
A split screen viewer enables staff to view primary and secondary care data at the same time with hyperlinks on each hospital event taking the user to detailed information about each one.
Engagement
Julie says the key to the product’s superb functionality is the fact that participants in the pilot were asked for their opinions as the software was developed.
She adds: “EMIS set up a log where we could make our suggestions via e-mail and these developments were given serious attention by the team and acted upon. It’s been really exciting to be involved in the development of a project from the beginning; we felt we were able to have a really useful input from the ground up as opposed to the usual top down approach with these kind of things.”
For example Julie asked the development team to give Qute the capability to show hospital admission dates, discharge dates and length of stay. She also asked them to tweak the software so it could show all episodes relating to a particular problem, for example, coronary heart disease.
“It means the user can quickly access exactly the information they need,” says Julie. “For us, one of the most common errors it is helping us identify is where a patient has moved surgery and the charge has been laid against their new practice – whereas it should have been to their old GP.”“Ultimately Qute will give us much quicker data validation of hospital episodes. It makes the job much more streamlined. And it just makes sense – the way it joins up all the relevant IT data that it was previously hard to bring together.”
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