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CSC reach 600 SystmOne deployments

27 Jul 2007

CSC have reached 600 installations of SystmOne GP system within the North, Midlands and East (NME) Programme for IT.

TPP, the supplier of the SystmOne software, is working with CSC, local service provider to the NME Programme for IT, to provide an integrated primary care solution, SystmOne GP, to GPs in the cluster. TPP also supplies software for CSC’s Child Health, Community and Prison health.

The six hundredth system went live at the Earls Barton Medical Centre in Northamptonshire earlier this month.

CSC’s director of primary care, Leigh Donoghue, told EHI Primary Care: “The momentum for deploying these systems, which first began when Accenture was the local service provider to the North-east and Eastern cluster, has continued to thrive in CSC’S NME Programme for IT patch and across the region, take-up of the TPP system is building.”

Donoghue said that in Yorkshire and the Humber, “30% of practices now use TPP and in the East Midlands 20% are using the system”.

According to Donoghue the key benefit of SystmOne is based around the shared care theme. “This is especially true for practices who are also dealing with issues such as minor injuries and cardiac care.”

In the Earls Barton Medical Centre, the system is already benefiting 540 district nurses, physiotherapists and other community clinicians throughout Northamptonshire, who are using the community system to streamline and share patient information.

Benefits of the system are said to include better patient information sharing with other GP practices, PCT community health staff and acute health trusts, protection from any natural disasters, management and support from the PCT, and integration with the NHS National Programme for IT so that other programmes such as Choose and Book and the Electronic Prescription Service.

Patient records can be transferred electronically between practices using the system. Practice manager, Stephen Blackman said: “We saw a patient transfer to our practice from one of the other 600 practices and immediately the entire patient’s full medical record was available to us on our system. This meant our doctor was able to know the patient’s full clinical history and the patient was assured that no medical details had been lost.

“Although we were already on an electronic system, we knew it was the right decision for us. As a dispensing practice we were concerned we would lose the barcode dispensing facility from our current system. However, we mentioned this to the supplier (CSC) and they developed this module and we became the first practice to have this available to us in the country. This has allowed us to monitor and cross check all drugs dispensed."

CSC says that it has begun to rollout additional modules which support shared care including hospice, which supports palliative care, and out-of-hours. Discussions are underway to extend this further, for example, to diabetes and drug rehab.

A number of trusts that have implemented SystmOne are now seeking direct integration between primary and secondary care. The LSP added that providing a level of integration between SystmOne and the iSoft Lorenzo solution is actively being looked at by developers.

Donoghue said: “Within the cluster we are seeing varying levels of appetite for new GP solutions, and some GPs and other practice officials may not be aware that they do have a choice of system to use.

"We are keen to increase awareness of this, and so we are holding practice manager events and information campaigns. This is especially important as GP Systems of Choice becomes a reality. We are also looking at outside cluster interest with a lot of demand especially within the Southern cluster.”

He added that CSC was committed to looking further into horizontal integration and the possibility of integrating healthcare systems across education and social services, so that the system fully supports the Common Assessment Framework and Single Assessment Process.

“We have currently deployed Liquidlogic systems to 60 trusts in the old Accenture cluster. The challenge we are facing is double entry of data between primary care trust systems and local authority systems, and we are looking to tackle this problem so that horizontal integration is supported by SystmOne in the way that it should be.”

CSC and TPP are also working closely with the Connecting for Health GP2GP team to join the national rollout of the service, which began this week. TPP uses Read code version 3 and it is currently not possible for codes to be translated from Read code 3 to Read code 2.

The system has been accredited by Connecting for Health to send and receive patient records between TPP practices as part of the GP2GP record transfer project, but is facing a challenge due to the Read code it uses.

Donoghue said: “The Read 3 code is SNOMED CT compliant, but a challenge for the purposes of GP2GP. We are working closely with CfH to find a solution to this so that our 600 practices can take advantage of this new opportunity of file transfers between different systems.”

SystmOne users are able to perform GP2GP transfers from one SystmOne practice to another SystmOne practice.

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