What do you want from your IT?

Originally published in GP magazine .

Written for GP magazine around 2007. This is the version I submitted - the published article may have been edited.

I recently surveyed practices in my PCT asking them what problems they were having. The results weren’t surprising: problems with servers, desktops, CfH projects not working etc. More interesting was that some practices asked for help with problems and didn’t know that solutions already existed. For example, some asked how they could print patient labels, unaware that several solutions exist. I feel our IT department should be visiting practices, assessing their IT usage, looking at their problems and offering tried and tested and, more importantly, approved solutions - not just implementing CfH projects and reacting when something is broken.

This led me to thinking: what might be out there that I didn’t know about, or more likely, what might I want that no one had yet created? If we could have a national debate and come up with some key themes, we could put some pressure on CfH, PCTs or software suppliers to deliver. Most new functionality seems to be released on the back of national programmes, though some small stuff is still released to help users, and this could be an opportunity to take back the agenda.

So what would you like your IT to do that it currently doesn’t do? Don’t worry if it sounds crazy or undoable. My editor here at GP is happy to collate ideas, so please email them in.

I will go first. I would like affordable voice recognition that really worked. I have tried several and never been convinced, despite spending hours training them. I would like EMIS to ask me why I had stopped a drug and be able to show me these on a separate screen so I didn’t forget what I had used before. I would like the results page in EMIS to show the clinical reason for the test - it’s really annoying that it doesn’t; it used to before PMIP.

I would like a way of telling the system to warn me when I haven’t had the results of a test back within a certain time, particularly on a patient where I thought it was important, or when a patient I have asked to come back for review exceeds a defined time period. I would like a button that synchronised all medications on a repeat screen, printing out the right number of tablets to get them all in line. I would like all clinical communication from our local hospital to come electronically into my electronic workflow system.

Most of these are easily doable and surprisingly I haven’t been that wild - what I want isn’t that difficult. I am interested to hear your ideas.