27 November 2009
Middlesbrough, Redcar & Cleveland: SystmOne - one year on
The primary care solution of SystmOne GP, Child Health and Community has been deployed across the Tees region, which comprises Middlesbrough, North Tees, Hartlepool, and Redcar & Cleveland PCTs and Middlesbrough, Redcar & Cleveland Community Services. All Child Health services in the Tees region are now live on SystmOne, as are 40 GP practices across Tees, more than 30 community services with over 100 users, and 8 Equitable Access Scheme centres, with two more in deployment.
One year on from the Child Health and Community Go Lives in Middlesbrough, Redcar & Cleveland, leading members of the projec tell us how they've been getting on.
Deployment
The Comwise system used in the area since 1985 had never been updated and was no longer suitable for use. Paul Calvert, Business Analyst Team Manager, explains why the PCT chose SystmOne to replace it: "Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland Trust is now a provider service. It's a competitive arena and we see SystmOne as a driver for business, and for patient care. With SystmOne, we can get services working together. For that reason, our goal is to deploy SystmOne across all of our Community and Child Health services."
TPP and Teesside ICT Support Services have been working together for several years now and have developed a positive working relationship. "It was difficult at first," says Paul, "but as soon as we met personally with Danielle Gerard and Chris Bates at TPP, discussed our expectations and began to trust each other, the project moved really quickly."
Sharon Martin is the Clinical Lead for Podiatry Services, the first of the community services to go live. The service was extremely keen to move to SystmOne and reap the benefits. "We were battering Paul's door down, demanding to know when we could have SystmOne," she says.
The Speech & Language Service followed shortly after. Imelda Clarke, Administrator for the service, says that staff were initially anxious about the move to SystmOne, but were all committed to it. She comments that, "As Paul told us it would be beforehand, the go live was actually an anti-climax; it was perfect." She continues, "SystmOne gives us the ability to respond to enquiries quickly because appointments and letters are available to view immediately. This makes our response to patients more professional and timely."
Alison Smithies, Paediatric Speech & Language Therapist, and Clinical lead for the project agrees, "Our experience of the deployment totally reflects how good the PCT project team is. If you don't have that support in the beginning, you won't get what you want out of the project."
Paul oversaw both projects and says, "SystmOne is extremely organic - you can bend it to meet the requirements of each service. But doing so means that you then need standardisation so that data for a new service is migrated in the same way and to the same places as it has been for other services with whom the records will be shared. We've used Podiatry as a model. Every deployment since that first one will be done in the same way."
Stella Harding, Business Change Lead, says, "With the community services, it isn't just the system you're changing, it's the person and the service itself. We had staff who had never used a mouse before. Feedback has been very good and now they're coming back to us with ideas of how they can get more out of the system."
Alison adds, "We've moved from a centrally-based service to a truly community-based service. We now have seven teams and most of the staff access SystmOne, which means they don't have to keep coming back to a central point to process paperwork and in turn, that means that the patients get their letters sooner."
Benefits
SystmOne fits the PCT's 'Lean' management philosophy which aims to achieve more value with less work. Stella says, "We achieve savings in that demographic data is only entered once. Also, with the old paper-based system, if Paediatrics needed to see the Child Health record, they would have to send it away from where it was stored. SystmOne solves those logistical problems and the security and data protection issues that come with them."
Sharon agrees, saying, "SystmOne fits into Lean like a dream. It allows us to change and standardise our processes - paper is out of the window, records can't go missing, reporting is easy, everything is auditable and we have tidy desks! Podiatry is now paperless and staff feel it is a more flexible service. Speech & Language Therapy now know which school a child attends without ringing Child Health, and so the record gets updated more efficiently."
Sandra Shea, School & Child Health Team Leader, says, "We moved to SystmOne for Child Health because we thought it would take our service, which covers 75,000 children under 19, forward. All Child Health services across the North East used to use different systems. We now all use SystmOne, and within SystmOne we use the same templates and Read codes to make sure that data is standardised across the region. SystmOne does more than we ever had and does it better than we ever had. Working with the local and regional user groups has helped us to make it even better still. We're learning all the time and believe that moving to SystmOne is definitely the best move we ever made."
Sandra continues, "Moving to SystmOne has brought discrepancies to light that we didn't know about previously, for example how many patients didn't have NHS Numbers. Now we can match them to Spine, we have 99.9% of patients with NHS Numbers. With our legacy system, we had access to any patient ever registered with the service, whereas on SystmOne, any patients that are not actively being cared for are deducted. That's made the data safer, made it watertight."
Sandra is also pleased with administrative tasks within SystmOne: "The school transfers are a big plus and are getting more and more useful as more units move to SystmOne. Previously, we had to go into each child's record and change the school. Now, we can do them in bulk and it's easy, it saves us a lot of time."
Future
Alison says, "We'd like all community staff to have their own access to SystmOne. At the moment, we only have two PCs per office. We are looking at mobile working, so the Briefcase solution could be great for us and we're looking forward to its launch."
Paul concludes, "We have 58 units live and we will be deploying to the rest of the Community services. In terms of GP, when the first one went live and others saw the benefits, the floodgates opened and we now have 14 practices who want to move. Our aim for the future is to get all the services working together. There are all manners of ways in which we can save time by optimising the use of SystmOne across services. The North East user group will be useful in progressing that aim."
For more information on Tees PCTs click here.
