Things my IT could do better - 1

Before anyone starts to think this blog is an endless stream of praise and good publicity I thought I’d do a piece on things that drive me mad. I suspect this will become a regular occurrence.

Now I have no particular hatred of EMIS and so please forgive me for keep picking on it, but it is perhaps the thing I use most so naturally it’s perhaps the thing that drives me mad the most.

Today I’m going to have a rant about the results screen.

Every day as GPs we sit and do our results. Well not just our results, results on people who have had them done for CDM clinics, results from people who aren’t in, which is always harder as you don’t know why the results were done and whether the person was expecting normal or abnormal.

This leads me to my complaint - there isn’t enough information on the results screen. My practice has invested in monitors - we put our own hands in our pockets and everyone has a 27“ widescreen monitor but the results screen is useless. All it has is the one result. If I click on a reading it will show me previous reading for that one value but not all of them.

Now locally we use Sunquest ICE. If you look at results in that you get a table with the most recent result on the left and all the previous values for those results going off to the right. This would be really useful.

In EMIS results - you often have more than one result per patient - why cant it put them all on the same screen - this is particularly annoying as it keeps wanting to SMS the patient their results. So you can see a normal FBC and send a message saying “your bloods are ok”, but then the renal function shows them to be dying and you send another saying please get in touch with the practice. ARGH!

Turning off the default send SMS without having to manually untick it every time would be great! As stated only sending it once per person would be useful. A read receipt would be helpful as I cant rely on it. I sent one about an MRI scan to a lady on a Friday evening telling her it was normal - she didn’t get it and worried about it all weekend until she saw me Monday am.

BAck to the information on the screen. I constantly have to flick to medication and constulations. I’m sure I’m getting RSI in my mouse finger. Also, each page takes time to load. Why can’t the results screen show me what drugs the patient is on? For example, I often get cholesterol results. I constantly have to check is the person on a statin? what dose? are they exempt or refusing? This is a common task that presumably 30000 GPs are doing every day - putting it on one screen could save the NHS hours every day.

Similarly showing me the last couple of consultations would help me know why they have had the bloods done. We often have patients attend an HCA health check where they have their vital signs measured  then they have bloods done and seeing this would be useful without having to click and click and click. Putting some measurements on screen like BP and pulse might be good too.

Now would all GPs like the same as me? perhaps not! what about a tile system? where the screen is split into 12 tiles in a 4x3 matrix? and I can choose what info goes in each tile? perhaps results are in the end 3. and other things like meds or problems are in other tiles?

I seem to remember seeing a demo of Vision where they said the user could choose what they saw on screen.. Perhaps its time to follow Wales and change system? Or perhaps we need a system where the API is trully opened up to the point where people can built custom front ends to do particular tasks?