Meeting requesting efficiency goals: the role of order communications

The hospital’s initial expectation was that the pathology, radiology and cardiology requesting system would be supplied by the National Health Service (NHS) National Programme for IT (NPfIT), an initiative from the UK’s Department of Health to move the NHS toward a single, centrally-mandated electronic healthcare record for patients and to connect 30,000 GPs to 300 hospitals in the UK.

The initiative, now known as NHS Connecting for Health (NHS CFH), has had well-publicised difficulties in delivering to planned deadlines. While it has provided a spine of patient information, including an electronic network to which primary care GPs can upload basic information that can be accessed from any UK healthcare facility, the initiative has not yet fully provided the systems necessary for secondary care facilities. Indeed, the scope of its future plans to do so have been scaled back, leaving secondary institutions with a serious void.

According to Mark McNally, West Suffolk Hospital’s project manager: “The original electronic care record initiative was intended to offer a set of integrated systems for secondary care, starting with administrative systems, but quickly extending to departmental and trust-wide clinical systems that would permit sharing of information with the GP community. These included order communications and electronic prescribing systems. This was, and remains, a worthy goal, but there was an underestimation of the complexity of hospital environments and several years of delay in achieving that goal has resulted. This left a vacuum for us in meeting the needs of our local healthcare community and we found we had to go out into the marketplace to find the systems we needed.”