DXS Point-of-Care was commissioned by West Hampshire CCG to provide GP practices with access to an integrated decision support tool that delivers Care Pathways, Guidelines, Patient Information and Referral Forms at the point of diagnosis or prescription.
West Hampshire CCG has 50 member GP practices with a patient population of approximately 540 000. It was recognised that DXS Point-of-Care would benefit GP practices by giving instant access to local documents and referral forms, all of which would be kept up-to-date at a central point.
Implementation of the software within practices was planned and managed by a dedicated DXS Project Implementation Group. Communication with GP practices about how the software would be installed and trained was key to a successful implementation.
Although knowledge prior to go-live of the DXS Point-of-Care software was provided to GP practices, training after implementation was agreed to be key. A flexible range of training options were implemented for the GP practices within West Hampshire. This included some on-site training sessions and a large number of virtual “classroom” sessions allowing for remote training, both of which were complemented by a comprehensive eLearning platform.
During implementation and training the CCG Project Implementation Group coordinated all relevant stakeholders and ensured clinical and technical input was regularly provided, enabling project milestones and key objectives to be met. The impact has proven to be highly successful. Usage of local care pathways is high, leading to better signposting of appropriate referrals and the consolidation of referral forms within one repository has led to time saving within individual GP practices.
Although the project is still within year one, the impact has proven to be highly successful. Feedback from GP practice staff has been positive and it is expected that the DXS Point-of-Care software will be key to the success of reducing referrals and improving cost savings to enable better use of resources within the wider health system in order to deliver improved patient care. Usage of local care pathways is high, leading to better signposting of appropriate referrals and the consolidation of referral forms within one repository has led to time saving within individual GP practices.
“A great place to share all of our local access forms and keep them up-to-date. It is a very good resource for finding information, leaflets, and support groups.”
“Having all of the referrals managed and available in one place is a real time-saver.”
“As a Manager, DXS ensures that the referral templates are the current version, contain the relevant mail merge fields and are in the correct format. Previously, time was wasted in the practice chasing different departments/organisations that sent us referral templates in PDF format (not suitable for inclusion on our clinical system), or password protected word documents that did not allow us to input the mail merge fields. It stops calls/faxes from various departments informing us that we are using the wrong version of their referral template because we never received the updated version. It’s one less task to complete when generally our workload is increasing.”
At project launch, Southampton CCG consisted of 31 practices working on two clinical systems, namely Emis and SystmOne. The CCG selected four pilot sites who received the software and on-site training, prior to main roll-out.
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