St Raphael’s Hospice reduces paper records with Crosscare
End-of-life care facility uses Advanced Health & Care solution to improve patient data accuracy
St Raphael’s Hospice in Sutton, Greater London, plans to go live with Crosscare, the leading clinical management system from Advanced Health & Care in November.
The hospice will implement the software to improve patient data accuracy, reduce paperwork, and enable more time to be spent with patients.
Following the rollout of the core system, St Raphael’s hopes to implement Crosscare Mobile, which will enable its community and hospice at home teams to access and update the patient records while visiting patients.
St Raphael’s, which supports 1,000 patients every year, has taken the opportunity to modernise its entire IT infrastructure including patient administration, fundraising and HR, with software that is built around driving efficiencies and streamlining staff’s day-to-day tasks.
Crosscare manages the patient journey throughout their time with the hospice. The system was selected by the hospice from a shortlist of two software providers due to its comprehensive functionality, its ability to interface with other NHS systems via the Medical Interoperability Gateway (MIG), and its popularity within the hospice sector, which means that there is lots of experience in other hospices to draw upon.
Mike Roycroft, chief executive of St Raphael’s, said: “Crosscare is becoming the de facto clinical management system for hospices across the country. We visited several hospices that were using the system and all of the staff were positive about the way it worked and the benefits it had delivered, leaving us in little doubt that this was the right system to choose for St Raphael's.”
The system will be used by clinical, medical, administrative and managerial staff across departments including inpatients, hospice at home, triage, day care and community palliative care. It will replace a completely paper-based process, enabling staff to update online patient records instantly with consultations, assessments and drug administration details.
Roycroft said: “We anticipate that within 18 months of implementing the software we will have dramatically reduced our reliance upon and use of patients’ paper records. It is paramount that staff are working with the most up-to-date record and Crosscare, as a web-based system that can be updated instantly and is accessible to everyone, will provide that.
“Recording assessment results and episodes in patients’ pathways onto an online care plan will allow us to be more responsive to people’s needs and more effective. By reducing bureaucracy, Crosscare will enable staff to have more time to deliver care, which is at the heart of what a hospice does.
“The system will provide valuable data and analysis that will help us to manage the hospice and the annual Minimum Data Set (MDS) report required by the National Council of Palliative Care will also be produced, almost at the press of a button.
“Working within a care sector involves multi-disciplinary teams and a system like Crosscare is fundamental to integrating these different groups and ensuring everyone has access to the same high-quality information to deliver more-effective, way that is tailored to each individual's needs.”