Manchester letters hub ready to go

The Greater Manchester health economy is deploying England’s largest electronic document management hub, involving ten acute trusts and 450 GP practices.

The trusts that make up the Greater Manchester group have signed a contract for up to five years with Softcat and PCTI Solutions to deliver the EDT Hub that will sit at the centre of the project.

There are more than 70 EDT Hubs in use across the UK that allow NHS trusts to send their patient clinical correspondence electronically to GP practices.

One hub has already been deployed in Salford and the goal is to have all ten trusts live in six months.

The aim is to then move quickly to having all patient letters delivered electronically, which will be in excess of 5m a year.

Greater Manchester electronic clinical correspondence programme co-ordinator Daniel Alexander told eHealth Insider the hubs have already been installed at the trusts, which are in the process of setting up their local governance arrangements.

Once trusts have confirmed how they will output from their source systems, testing will begin with a couple of GP practices receiving documents electronically.

Testing will also be done on hub-to-hub transfer, but not with live patient data as sharing agreements are yet to be developed and agreed upon.

Once this development work is completed the timetable for rolling out to GPs will be finalised.

“There’s still quite a bit unconfirmed, but the wheels are greased and in motion,” said Alexander.

“It’s a very ambitious project and the team are working hard to meet that ambitious timescale.

“I do anticipate that we will be deploying to GP practices within six month, but that doesn’t intimate that the project is finished,” he added.

Alexander was project manager for the successful Salford deployment of the EDT Hub.

He said many of the resources created and lessons learned during that implementation will be applied to the Greater Manchester project.

“I’m confident we have buy-in from all the stakeholders involved. This is a high priority for Greater Manchester,” he said.

He added that the hub will be particularly beneficial for specialist services such as The Christie NHS Foundation Trust cancer centre, which receives patients from across the region.

Dr John Hampson of Greenmount Medical Centre, Bury, said demands on administrative staff and GPs are “exponentially increasing” and receiving documents electronically will make the back office more efficient.

For all those practices that already use PCTI’s Docman document management system (around 50% across the region), electronic letters will be inserted directly into the workflow.

Practices not using Docman will be provided with a “one click install collection application” that will automatically collect all electronic documents for onward processing within the practice.

A release from PCTI says that future developments may include multi-directional document transfer enabling GP practices to send electronic documents back to trusts and other organisations.

PCTI said cost savings are expected to well exceed £1m, which excludes the savings made by GP practices.