Gaining New Efficiencies at De Pary’s
Client: De Pary’s Medical Centre
Challenge: Replace a 16-year-old inefficient legacy system.
Solution: CSC’s integrated primary care solution, SystmOne, which is built around a single patient record, enabling collaborative working across care settings.
Results: A new system that meets clinicians’ functional needs, manages administration more effectively and improves business processes.
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De Pary’s Medical Centre in Bedford – a busy practice with 10 GPs and 47 staff that looks after more 15,000 patients – was experiencing problems with its 16-year-old legacy system. The Centre needed a new system that was more efficient, integrated and patient centred.
Practice Manager Maggie Gardner says: “The system, which was time consuming for simple processes, was costing our administration staff a lot of time. We needed a system that could keep up with us.”
Meeting functional needs
For the last 16 years, the practice, which sees more than 800 patients a day as well as dispenses medicines, had been using EMIS LV. The move to CSC’s integrated primary care solution, SystmOne, allowed the centre to meet clinicians’ functional needs, manage administration more effectively and improve business processes.
A joint team from NHS and CSC deployed the solution, as part of the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfiT), which was established to support the delivery of world-class patient care and services. The team ensured the delivery of a professionally managed project that included comprehensive data migration, business change and training.
Enabling integrated care
As a centrally managed solution, SystmOne’s clinical database is hosted in a secure data centre, eliminating the centre’s need to make nightly back-ups or maintain a local server. In addition, centralised administration and the single patient record — shared across GP, community and child health — enabled more efficient and integrated care. Also, by using separate reporting servers, more than 1,600 reports can be run without interfering with other work.
After using a legacy system for almost two decades, change was going to be challenging. The fact that SystmOne enables each clinician to tailor their screen to reflect their personal preferences helps to reduce this challenge. And when asked what she would say to other practices considering the switch, Maggie Gardner is clear: “The question isn’t why would you do it — ask yourself why you wouldn’t?”