Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust is planning to roll out the CliniSys ICE (integrated clinical environment) system to enable local GPs to order laboratory tests electronically.
It is planning to pilot the system with five GP practices from November with a series of deployments to cover all 47 practices by March of next year.
ICE will be integrated with the Swift Lab laboratory information management system (LIMS) as part of the trust’s My Care clinical transformation programme. This also involves implementing a new electronic patient record system from Epic to go live in June 2020.
Sarah Hodder, diagnostics cluster manager for the Royal Devon and Exeter, said the ICE implementation will remove the paper from the current process in which GPs send request cards, which have to be manually transcribed for the LIMS, along with samples for tests.
They already receive test results electronically and will now be able to access all the results of tests in secondary care. In addition, the My Care programme will eventually provide a clinical portal for GPs to view other information relating their patients’ care in hospital.
Dr Cressida Auckland, pathology clinical lead at the trust, said: “We are really excited to offer this requesting service – as well as the obvious benefits in terms of simplicity and accuracy, we hope to use it to develop peninsular-wide order sets that will ensure the best possible use of our pathology services, and improve our investigation and treatment of our patients.”
Image from CliniSys
