Hinchingbrooke saves time and costs through delivering electronic GP letters

Hinchingbrooke Health Care NHS Trust has implemented a solution which manages the electronic generation and distribution of letters sent to GPs following appointments from A&E, inpatient and outpatient departments.

Hinchingbrooke was recently presented with a new target against GP letters. The target was to send letters for outpatients within three days, and inpatients and A&E letters within 24 hours. Across these three areas the trust handles more than 1,000 patients a day. Faced with potential fines of £75 per patient where letters were not sent within this timeframe, Hinchingbrooke needed a solution to speed up this manually-laborious process.

The GP letters solution, provided by Ascribe, is based on Microsoft SharePoint technology which acts as a centralised hub where information from multiple systems can be collated, then using the GPs’ email addresses and a set of templates, an electronic GP letter can be automatically produced and emailed, saving significant time and cost in the production and postage that sending physical letters out would incur.

The information to generate the letters is picked up from A&E, inpatient and outpatient systems, which are also provided by Ascribe; Ascribe Symphony, Ascribe eCaMIS Patient Administration System, and Ascribe’s eDischarge solution.

Gordon Greaves, associate director of IT at the trust, said: “The GP letters solution has been a fantastic piece of work that has quickly enabled us to meet our targets. All information can now be submitted within 24 hours from a process that used to take up to two weeks for letters to get to the GP. The solution has improved communication with GPs and enhanced information flow, which ultimately contributes to patient safety by improving the quality and speed of patient data between hospitals and GP surgeries.”