Through our regular contact with GPs, we heard consistent feedback that valuable time was being spent in the practice managing and filing diagnostic reports to the patient record, when received via NHSMail.
The use of NHSMail was also leading to missing reports or report delays due to practice mailboxes reaching capacity and mails being rejected. More time was wasted chasing reports and asking for them to be resent.
The process was also at risk of human error through the re-entering of data, potentially impacting clinical safety.
InHealth elected to partner with Docman, a national electronic document transfer to Healthcare organisations. We made some configuration changes to our in-house Patient Management System, xRM, to enable Digital Delivery as a sending method and developed a HL7 interface with the Docman Managed Hub. As the Docman managed hub already had thousands of UK GP practices connected, we had instant integration capability, without the need for any change to GP systems.
Following a successful pilot in Haringey and Enfield CCGs, Digital Report Delivery was made available to all our GP referrers at no additional cost to the CCGs.
Practices report that Digital Report Delivery has saved them up to 7 hours per day of admin time – time that can be better spent elsewhere. The solution is proactively monitored, meaning we can resolve any issues before they arise.
Other benefits include reduced potential for clinical risk as the process is fully automated – there is no need to re-enter patient information as the report is automatically filed into the correct patient record.
To date, thousands of diagnostic reports have been sent to GPs using our Digital Report Delivery solution.
Without fail, all reports are workflowed to clinicians, we don’t ever have a backlog. It has transformed the way we work and ensures that we can give the best possible service to our patients
