Endoscopy nurses code in clinic

Prime Endoscopy Bristol has gone paperless and has nurses doing SNOMED coding while in clinic using a system from Responsive Health.

The Bristol unit first implemented the endoscopy management system in 2012. Version two, which includes tablet and phone functionality, was rolled out in December 2014.

Nurses now record the entire patient pathway digitally using hand held computers, including coding in real-time

The unit recently included all surveillance patients in the electronic patient record system, fully automating the patient call-back service and ensuring patients do not slip through the cracks of a paper system.

The unit, which is run by local GPs and sees 4,000-5,000 patients a year, has around 50 users of the system.

GPs can triage from any location and the electronic record of the patient journey begins from this point.

Responsive Health director Rosemary Bolton said both clinicians and nurses have begun inputting SNOMED codes for procedures while in clinic, improving accuracy and greatly reducing the time needed for producing reports.

“Previously, procedures often got coded by an administration team so it was removed from the patient. Now you’ve got the nurse, clinician and patient all in a room and in terms of accuracy it’s so much higher,” she explained.

Before the digitisation project started, senior managers spent a significant portion of every month pulling together data to send to the clinical commissioning group. Now the process is done automatically as soon as a patient has had a procedure.

Similarly, diagnostic returns required by the Department of Health are automatically populated with patient data.

Bolton said the savings are equivalent to one administrative staff member as well as saving clinicians’ time and improvements in patient safety due to information not being lost in the many books it was previously held in.

Biopsy results are also now alerted on the system for clinicians to check and dashboards show waiting list information at a glance, she added.