For many years most Scottish practices have used GPASS as their clinical software. It seems however, that the functionality was insufficient to cope with the GP contract and practices have or will be changing systems to use either EMIS or In Practice Systems (Vision). It is likely that over 50 per cent of GP practices in Scotland will use EMIS. In view of the increasing number of practices using EMIS in Scotland, we felt it would be appropriate to have a section for Scottish users in EMISUser. The transition from GPASS to EMIS and In Practice Systems continues and GPASS will cease to be used in practices in early in 2012.
Representation on EMIS NUG
In view of the increasing number of users in Scotland, it was agreed at the NUG committee meeting on 9th April 2011, that there would be two representatives from Scotland on the committee. We are delighted that Dr Keith Burns has recently joined the NUG committee as a co-opted member. Changes to the NUG constitution will be proposed at the AGM in September this year to give 2 seats for representatives from Scottish practices.
IT developments
Other IT developments in Scotland 24 include the ability to send referrals from the GP’s desk top in the consulting room to the hospital, using SCI Gateway referrals. This means that referrals can be sent in a matter of minutes and the sender can check that the referral has been received.
SCCRS (Scottish Cervical and Recall Systems) is a central recall system for sending reminder letters to women, to inform them that their smear is due. This reduces workload for practices and also means women are less likely to get lost from follow up, when they move practices. The results and recall dates are now fed back directly into GP systems.
The SNUG (Scottish National User Group) has recently been formed which covers all GP IT in Scotland, such as Docman, SCCRS etc and works with EMIS and In Practice Systems User Groups. Join the discussion The email address for the Scottish list is: scotland@emisnug.net
Top tips for PCS users in Scotland
The right side of the prescription can be configured to show the last issue date under “N” for configuration on prescribing screen.
Medication issue “outside”- this can be used for drugs which are prescribed by the hospital. If the drug is entered on the prescribing screen, both the GPs and the out-of –hours service know the patient’s complete prescribing record. If someone in the practice tries to issue the drug a large warning box alerts the prescriber that the drug is normally issued “outside” the practice.
When searching for drugs, particularly appliances to avoid the ‘what you search for must be the first part of the entry’ problem then enter a space before the search item and it will bring back all results, not just those which start with the term. Also when processing a postal request for catheter or colostomy appliances if you enter the product code EMIS will take you straight to the entry.
Copy and paste for SCI Gateway referrals: use the keyboard for this and it saves a lot of typing. Ctrl C- to copy from the consultation screen in EMIS and Ctrl V – to paste. If you use the mouse, PCS crashes. EMIS is investigating this problem.