A Qute tool for Practice-based Commissioning

Four GP surgeries in Huntingdon are currently piloting Qute, a reporting and
reconciliation tool that is set to revolutionise the way that practices manage and
monitor healthcare commissioning. The software is being developed through an
innovative joint commercial partnership between Cambridgeshire PCT and leading
GP software provider EMIS.

This special feature examines how the Qute programme will not only offer GPs an easy way of reconciling bills from secondary care trusts with their own record of patient referrals but also ultimately save them money.

Doctors and practice managers who have been piloting Qute in their surgeries report
on their experiences so far.

Users in the driving seat The key to any successful e-healthcare programme is the involvement of clinicians and administrative staff from the very start of design and development. They’re the ones who will use it, they know the functionality they will need, and they can say what works and what doesn’t. “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. Reducing the validation burden "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," says Julie Faller, practice manager at Cedar House surgery in St Neots, Cambridgeshire.

E-Health Insider is published by E-Health Media Ltd