Poole Wins HSJ Technology Award

Poole Hospital NHS Trust has won a Health Service Journal management award in the category for improving care with e-technology. The prize, sponsored by BT, was awarded for the trust’s development of an XML-based electronic patient record system.

The trust, together with its technology partner Graphnet, has implemented an EPR system that now has more than 1.5 million XML-based patient records, together with results ordering and reporting for pathology and radiology.

A quarter of the staff are already using the EPR system which is now being rolled out across the trust. The judges said the project had a good evidence base for its results and had produced "excellent benefits".

As E-Health Insider first reported in March a user survey (EHI, 12 March) undertaken by the trust had identified significant concrete benefits in time taken to track down records and find information.

Clinicians at Poole say the system saves them two to six hours a week looking for information, with similar benefits reported by junior doctors and nurses. Major benefits have also been delivered in data quality and clinical audit thanks to the clear electronic audit trail for each record.

Another key feature of the Poole project has been its relatively rapid results, which saw initial implementation completed within six months and roll out across the hospital beginning after 12 months.

The judges said the project won the category of improving care with e-technology because "It has long-term buy-in from clinicians and has been ‘owned’ by staff outside the information management and technology team since the outset".

In March Andy Hadley, head of IT at Poole told EHI that clinicians were generally keen to use the system and the hospital’s capacity to train was the constraining factor on wider use of the system.

Winning ‘hearts and minds’ locally has been part of the project from the outset. A strategic group including key trust directors, general managers, consultants, and senior nurses oversee IT projects at the hospital. An EPR users group was also established to ensure the system meets user’s needs.

Tony Sharer, director of Graphnet, told EHI "The EPR system had to win over hearts and minds of users, if you don’t get the buy in of doctors and nurses systems just won’t get used." He added that development of systems using an XML-based approach allowed for incremental development, based on local resource constraints.

The vital ingredient he stressed was partnership: "Partnership between a hospital and its supplier is vital, you must have a common objective, be able to communicate openly and have a common drive and vision," said Mr Sharer.

Runners up in the ‘Improving Care with e-Technology’ category were:

• University Hospital Birmingham Trust, for the design and introduction of a rule-based computerised prescribing system.

• Walsall Primary Care Trust, for its ‘Fusion’ project – a one-stop shop for information about patients within the Walsall health community.

• Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh Trust, for an electronic case notes system for the treatment of acute coronary care.