Over 2 years on after deployment, Shaun Fieldhouse — Orthopaedic Physiotherapy Practitioner at Bridgewater Community Healthcare NHS Trust reflects on the benefits realised following deployment of TPP SystmOne Community.
KEY BENEFITS – The Numbers
Efficiency
- An electronic platform which released approximately 7,587 staff hours per year to focus greater staff time on the quality service provided to patients and reduce multitasking.
- Allowed the service to accommodate increased levels of referrals, with approximately 600 extra referrals a month.
- System alerts when a patient arrives in clinic saves 3,850 hours per year of clinical time.
- Setting up case notes and adding patients to waiting list electronically saves 1,800 hours per year of administrative time.
- Writing up of titles and headings of various body parts within the electronic record saves 715 hours per year of clinical time.
- No longer requesting old case notes from storage saves £300 per year.
Effective
- Whole service view: increasing visibility and management/ control of service. As a result, clinic overbooking has reduced and a more professional/informed service has been provided (e.g. when booking appointments), improving both patient and staff satisfaction.
- Increased consistency in approach to clinical assessment and data capture, with prompts and mandatory fields to record specific information.
Safe
- Increased richness and quality of information available to the clinician, leading to more informed decision making and improved clinical outcomes.
Accessibility
- Enables staff to input and view timely information securely at different Trust sites without manual handover of information.
IMPLEMENTATION / DEPLOYMENT OVERVIEW
As part of the National Programme for Information Technology (NPfIT), TPP SystmOne Community was deployed at Bridgewater Community Healthcare NHS Trust to support the care and management within Musculoskeletal Physiotherapy Service. This replaced a combined process of electronic patient demographic information using iPM (i.Patient Management) and paper based case notes for clinical information . SystmOne Community module has been deployed to three sites to date: Ashton, Platt Bridge and Wigan. Three further deployments are due at Warrington, St Helens and Halton.
In preparation for the roll out of the system, the trust visited a Physiotherapy Service at another site that had deployed SystmOne. Formal training was provided for the administrative side of the system. However, clinical training was provided through a training environment, enabling users to explore with different test scenarios to gain a better understanding of using the system. Presenting the system to clinicians did provide some challenges, getting agreement on required configuration was essential, although this brought familiarity and engagement ready for when the system went live. The week before go live, in December 2013, the organisation held a “black week”, running clinics low to ensure staff were fully trained on the new solution. Data migration was also undertaken during this period, and the trust identified some coding issues between iPM and SystmOne, which were rectified. On deployment of SystmOne, appointment times were increased in the short term to facilitate a smooth transition. Following the upload of clinical case loads, there was a phased a roll out to sites starting in Wig- an. The other two sites continued with paper records initially, moving over to fully electronic records for new patients.
