Worcestershire expects to save with ITK

Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust is expecting to save more than £100,000 after implementing an electronic discharge summary system from Bluespier using interoperability toolkit standards.

The trust, which is using Bluespier EDS for all clinical correspondence, went live with the system in March says it will realise the savings through a reduction in postage costs and trust wide efficiency gains.

John Thornbury, director of ICT at the trust told E-Health Insider: “We’ve gone live with theatres and are using it for all clinical correspondence, which has the same electronic capability using the ITK from NHS Connecting for Health.

“We’re also using it for a number of specialised areas, such as rheumatology, and proposing to use it in stroke with particular reference to the capture of CQUIN (Commissioning for Quality and Innovation) data,” he added.

The trust maintains that whilst the savings are an indicative target and will be reviewed at a later date, the system will dramatically reduce costs associated with the dispatch of more than half a million letters to GPs every year.

Thornbury added: “These savings come from some postage costs and efficiency savings. For example, at the trust, reduced time printing, folding and transporting paper and, at GP practices, opening post and scanning letters.

"This also supports reduction in carbon footprint and sustainability in health economy. The system links with practices using Docman and uses IntelliSense to help automatic coding. It also uses the flexible workflow inherent in the product.”

Earlier this year, CfH asked suppliers to help develop and test standards for electronic discharge summaries in an extension to its interoperability toolkit programme. Bluespier successfully completed the proof of concept witness testing in March.

Gavin Webb, technical director for Bluespier International, said: “By using an open architecture, we have made it possible for our system to talk to any system in any trusts’ framework. In the longer term this will mean that information transfer will be cheaper and easier. We are delighted with the outcome.

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