500th practice goes live with SystmOne GP system

StowHealth Centre has become the 500th practice to go live with the SystmOne integrated GP record system provided by TPP (The Phoenix Partnership) and delivered by the CSC Alliance for NHS Connecting for Health.

The new GP system, which provides a shared GP clinical record, will support the delivery of care for the 15,500 patients of the StowHealth Centre based in Stowmarket, Suffolk. The system will be

Dr Mark Shenton, one of nine GP partners at the Stowmarket practice, which employs 60 staff, said: "We had been a paperless surgery for six years. We have moved forward again by choosing SystmOne GP ahead of updating our existing system because it will integrate with the government’s National Programme for IT.

The SystmOne GP system is said to speed up and integrate healthcare, from booking convenient On the Day examinations after a telephone consultation with a duty doctor, to helping to reduce waiting times for routine scheduled appointments by allowing automated patient check-in.

Dr Shenton added: "The potential of this system is fantastic. Around one million consultations were transferred to our new system without a hitch."

Dr Neil Macey, who helped lead the transition to the new system said the system was already delivering benefits: "We have templates for asthma sufferers to identify and analyse patient history or can develop our own to help diagnosis, using diagrams and cross referencing."

The Stowmarket practice has also used the SystmOne GP system to redesign their patient management system for the award-winning Long Term Condition Clinic.

Dr Shenton said: "Patients were coming back three or four times a year for hypertension, heart disease, diabetes or lung problems. These long-term conditions involved countless blood and cholesterol tests on separate visits. We identified 3,300 had 4,500 conditions and cut visits by 20 per cent. Patients are happy with a more personalised service."

The SystmOne Child Health system meanwhile allows clinical staff to monitor child immunisation plans and schedule regular health checks, while SystmOne Community means district nurses at community sites in Suffolk can now notify GPs in real-time if a patient has been accepted on their caseload and even the actual time spent on treatment.

Dr Shenton said that in the future the new GP system will have a key role to play in supporting practice-based commissioning in a shared clinical environment. Dr Shenton said: "We will soon by sharing patient records with neighbouring surgeries. This system allows this integration, the sharing of clinical information on screen in real-time. It allows us to do it quickly and we are not waiting for a pile of papers on patients to arrive from another hospital or community clinic."

CfH says that by 2013, the £12.4 billion NPfIT will connect more than 30,000 GPs in England to almost 300 hospitals and give patients access to their personal healthcare information.