Getting your practice ready for EMIS Web

Originally published in GP magazine .

Written for GP magazine around 2010. This is the version I submitted - the published article may have been edited.

Moving over to EMIS Web will be inevitable for a lot of us next year, so it might be worth thinking about the process. The data transfer is no longer a concern. Gone are the days of losing prescribing data, Read codes, you name it. All existing data will be there. Using the system is the problem you are going to have to cope with.

While EMIS stress that keyboard shortcuts still work and macros are there, the reality is the new version is a feature-rich evolution and it does some things differently. There is a centralised inbox for all your results and messages. There is a new appointments system and new modules including searches and reports, and what looks particularly interesting to me is a reworked protocols section.

EMIS are offering a familiarisation service for up to six months prior to switching. This in their words “permits read-only access to live data and allows GPs to experience the whole system via read/write access to ‘dummy’ patient data”. So basically you can go into EMIS Web and play with data you have just added; however you can’t add a consultation on EMIS Web and see it in your existing system.

To me, typical human nature means unless guided most people will leave everything to the last week of the six months, and the only people who will look are the more IT literate, who probably need it least. So in reality your practice manager or IT partner needs to be organised and plan some training.

Unstructured time is pointless - you need to create a series of vignettes for people to try out. It is probably a good idea to base these around real patients. They should be aimed at different staff grades, e.g. reception, audit, nurse etc.

For example your reception scenarios might include a simple appointment request, an urgent one, a patient who needs a double appointment and lastly a joint appointment between nurse and doctor.

Consultation scenarios might start with a simple pill check, then a sore throat in someone who is penicillin allergic, then get more complicated - someone with more than one problem, someone who requests their repeat meds whilst consulting about an eye problem. Nurses need to be familiar with entering data on a chronic disease review.

One of the advantages of the new system is the new templates, popups and protocols, and it is important to test people out on these. However they will need building first. It might be a good idea to create some new templates that are standardised across practices if you don’t have them already (or at least have common elements).

Have a training sheet per person - mark off when they have accomplished each task. One-to-one training might be needed for some. Some might want to play by themselves only; however there is the old story about Bill Gates, when he ran Microsoft, congratulating the Word team for its new features, and they didn’t have the balls to tell him they weren’t new, he just hadn’t been able to find them - so don’t assume your staff will find all the shortcuts. So crib sheets including hints and tips, some shared learning events as well as one-to-one training are all important.