Morecambe delivers digital letters

University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust is sending discharge summaries and A&E letters electronically to GPs following a two-month deployment of Docman Hub.

Together with Lancashire North Clinical Commissioning Group, the trust began to deploy PCTI’s hub in November last year and went live two months later.

David Slater, Morecambe Bay’s project manager and Lancaster North CCG’s programme manager, said that after a pilot with one GP practice, the system was quickly rolled out to the other practices.

“Practices in our area use Docman with their clinical system Emis Web or INPS Vision. Documents delivered into Docman arrive with the attached structured meta-data to pre-populate the fields to file the document,” he said.

So far, the trust is sending discharge summaries and A&E letters to local GPs, but has identified six further documents which will be added in due course.

“We are doing a piece of work in our CCG to investigate what letters are sent to practices and where they come from. By doing this we will be able to push more letters through Docman Hub and generate even greater benefits with the view to sending every letter through our Hub,” said slater.

“This project was driven by GPs wanting information delivered directly into Docman electronically, so the more we can do the greater benefits all our stakeholders will realise.”

Slater added that the project was able to go live so quickly because of the joined-up approach of stakeholders across the CCG.

“We have a really close and strong working relationship between the trust, practices and the CCG to really support and drive projects,” he said.

“It is vital for any project to have the buy-in from all stakeholders and to have GP engagement before any project starts. We did a pilot with a GP practice and after immediately seeing the benefits we quickly rolled-out the solution to the other practice.”