Bristol CIC signs up for Emis Web

Bristol Community Health, a not-for-profit organisation, is set to sign a five-year contract to roll out Emis Web to its 1,000 community staff.

The organisation is currently using the RiO care record system, but its contract runs out in October 2015.

Aileen Fraser, clinical director at Bristol Community Health, said that when the organisation looked around for a replacement, it found that Emis Web offered the best match for its needs.

A particular consideration was the ability to share data with the many local GP practices already using Emis Web, Fraser added.

“A lot of our staff are working very closely with the primary care teams, so having a system like Emis means that there's less duplication, and patient information can be better shared across the services.”

Bristol Community Health has done a lot of work with TotalMobile to enable its staff, who provide services such as physiotherapy, diabetes support, and nursing and palliative care to Bristol residents, to access its corporate and clinical systems on mobile devices.

Fraser said that while the work had included RiO, Emis Web will also be able to integrate with the TotalMobile app platform.

The CIC has already started the process of implementation, and Fraser said it was well aware of the challenges of moving to a new system.

“Because we're dealing with patient data and have a number of different services across a number of different locations, we need to engage with each of those services to make sure that the clinical system will work for them,” she said.

However, the CIC anticipates that the move to Emis Web will result in efficiency improvements.

“At the moment our staff enter information onto RiO and then they have to go back into the GP record. “If the information is accessed directly, GPs are going to get it in a far more timely way,” said Fraser.

The organisation has already begun approaching GPs asking them to enter into data-sharing agreements, she added.

The implementation is also part of a wider move towards integration. Bristol Community Health has signed up for Connecting Care, an electronic patient record that allows health and social care professionals to share summary information across Bristol.

“All of that is working to improve patient care and safety and reduce all the duplication of us asking the patient the same question five or six times,” she said.

In the long run, Emis Web will help improve patient safety, said Fraser: “If you've got the data in one place, accessible to all the healthcare and social care professionals, then clinical decisions are made with better information.”

It would also save time, she said: “We want clinical staff to have as much time as possible to spend with patients, and we believe that EMIS will enable us to do more of that.”

Andy Kinnear from the South West Clinical Support Unit, who is leading the Connecting Care project, will be talking about it in the latest of EHI’s Health CIO Best Practice Webinars on 19 December. The webinar is free: register now.