Poole upgrades CareCentric

Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with an upgraded version of the CareCentric shared care record software from Graphnet Health.

Around 5,000 users across Dorset – at the acute Trust, in clinical networks, GP practices, social services, community teams and community hospitals – are live with the system, which is accessed on average more than 9,000 times each day.

The trust, which uses a CaMIS patient administration system from Ascribe, started implementing Graphnet software in 2000 and uses it as its core electronic patient record.

Data fed in automatically to the system includes PAS activity and outcomes, pathology results, radiology reports, GP referral letters, A&E discharge information, neurophysiology results, medical photography, cardio-respiratory results and digital dictation.

Poole has also built a large number of specialist clinical solutions around the EPR using Graphnet’s form building capability and has 170 active clinical documents.

As part of the upgrade to CareCentric, around 47m documents were migrated across, with total system down-time of just over half an hour.

Dr Rupert Page, consultant neurologist and clinical IT lead at Poole Hospital, said: “It’s not just a new release, it’s completely re-written and re-coded and we’re using that as the basis to push on in terms of future development”.

“Already we have more functionality in terms of clinical documents, what we can do with them, because we were pushing the complexity of the documents we had to the limit,” he said.

The new software will allow improved integration with existing systems in use across the health economy. Clinicians at the 620-bed Poole Hospital now have access to patient data stored in the Ascribe system at the Royal Bournemouth & Christchurch Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and vice versa.

Dr Page explained that previously the hospitals, which are seven miles apart, were only able to share paper notes and see a patient’s results information if a patient was admitted at the neighbouring site.

There are also plans to integrate more information from the GP record into the hospital EPR and talks are going on to share information with the local mental health provider.

Users of the CareCentric record in Poole include 50 GP practices, community hospitals, social services, specialist clinicians at other local acute trusts and the South West Ambulance Service.