We had an excellent meeting today with the NUG UDR Team.
Starting with a review of progress of the National services it was good to hear that things are now moving again with sending controlled drugs via EPS and the team are now hopeful that we should be able to have this in place by the end of the year. Also good to hear that the changes to the delivery mechanism mean that it will no longer require all systems to be compliant before any can move. We were also told that the uptake of the Summary Care Record Viewer has been slow, is this because users are not aware that it is there? Perhaps we need better aways of alerting users to its presence at appropriate points.
We moved on to review the requirements coming through GPSoC. Whilst the UDR team does not have any direct input, it was useful to review these which will inform the NUG's input to the GPSoC Advisory Group (which is now tasked with helping GPSoC prioritise requests to the principal system suppliers).
Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) is a method of sending structured clinical communications which is coming our way and will eventually replace the various other systems in use. EMIS have now deployed the technology in EMIS Web to receive some of the early types of these documents, and have ongoing work to develop the next phase. The group was shown some of the early work in progress for how this will be brought into the clinical system. It is very useful to start to see things at the early stage when we can point out things that will need to be done to ensure the ease of use for end users!
SNOMED CT is coming! We were reassured to see that EMIS is well placed for the move to SNOMED CT, but the critical feature is going to be the user interface for code selection. The User Experience (UX) team have been out to visit a number of practices and reported back their experiences using some mock ups. They will be coming to the NUG September conference for further User input, hoping to try out some prototypes on us all!
EMIS Has released more "Clinical Content" recently, and sometimes this has been controversial (as with the Sepsis Alerts). The UDR group is going to work with EMIS in helping prioritise new calculators and alerts as well as looking at how these are released to the user-base.
Developments that have been done and are ready for release:
- Including patient middle names in the patient find: This is already in the early release phase of version 6.1
- Changing the practice default settings for problems: This is already in the early release phase of version 6.1
- Managing problems when adding within the consultation (i.e. Group/Combine/Evolve): This is already in the early release phase of version 6.1
- Displaying middle names in the Précis bar: This is scheduled for release 6.3
Developments in development:
- Integration of the QBleed/QStroke tool into EMIS Web
- The ability to trigger a protocol when selecting a drug in the add drug dialogue
- A wizard to support the process when a user leaves the practice
Pending allocation to development:
- Changes to the alerts when prescribing (new prototypes being created for testing before development progresses)
- Functionality to add a "replace drug" option to medication management
We then looked at our list of other suggestions. I'll write separately about these soon!
In the mean time, enjoy the developments as they arrive, and don't forget to keep a regular eye on the release notes to see the new functionality as it appears!