Coventry closes the loop

University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust has achieved a full closed-loop audit of results acknowledgment.

A new module of its home-grown ‘clinical results reporting system’ went live six months ago and has been a success with clinicians, achieving 97% compliance.

Logging into the system, which can also be used as a performance tool, the consultant can see a list of all results requested and their status.

Bev Thompson, the trust’s EPR programme manager, told EHI that the trust previously had a number of serious incidents with results and that some clinicians would get their secretaries to do the requesting, despite it going against national requirements.

“We had absolutely no visibility of that, but when we implemented the new module, compliance rates exceeded 70% within a few weeks and we recently had 97% compliance,” said Thompson.

“It provides a closed loop audit and integrated work flow. Once you log in you know right away how many results you have to deal with.”

The consultants can view their own lists, see if any of their junior doctors have requested anything, view results and share them with colleagues, should a second opinion be needed.

“Previously they would just have a list of result requests to review. Because there are so many lists it can be overwhelming, so they can filter it to only flag up abnormal results for instance. You can also see outstanding reviews,” explained Thompson.

The secret to the compliance is clinical engagement she added. The trust took a different approach to the training, only offering people the training they wanted.

“We said ‘we’re going to provide training if you want it. If you’re happy to use it and don’t want training, fine, or if you want online training you can get it.’ We even offered one-on-one training if someone needed it,” said Thompson.

The trust rolled out the system in a ‘soft launch’ and gave clinicians six weeks before going completely electronic.

“We launched it in February and gave people six weeks to get used to it and switched off the paper completely in April,” said Thompson.

“It’s a huge success story. We don’t think that functionality exists in other systems.”

Read more about the trust’s EPR development in Insight.