IT system improves patient safety and enables hospitals to improve efficiency

7th December 2011 – Ascribe, the leading healthcare solution provider, announced today that it has successfully gone live with an eDischarge system at Bolton NHS Foundation Trust, for use at the Royal Bolton Hospital. Ascribe eDischarge (eDS) captures the clinical information during a patient’s stay and allows the doctors to prescribe the discharge medication electronically, and emails their G.P. with a summary overview of their diagnosis, test results and prescribed medications (including any changes to their medication regime).

Ascribe eDS is a web-based solution that combines electronic prescribing, capture of clinical information,  and medicines management workflow to create an integrated system to improve patient care and facilitates seamless care between healthcare professionals. The timely communication of accurate and legible discharge summaries is a key performance target for hospitals. Ascribe eDS helps to meet the 24 hour target for communicating the discharge summary to the GP.

It does this by capturing all relevant patient information throughout the patient’s journey, so that patient details and changes to information are updated quickly and follow-ups and referrals can be prepared in advance. Ascribe eDS provides seamless handover of on-going care with significant benefits for both patients and healthcare staff.

Ascribe eDS benefits:

1.Enables the Royal Bolton Hospital to meet the PCT 24 hour discharge summary target.

2.Faster patient discharge turn-around times.

3.Safer prescribing and dispensing of discharge medication.

4.GPs and community healthcare staff fully informed about the on-going care needs of the patient.

5.Improved communication and visibility of discharge activity across the whole healthcare team.

The Royal Bolton Hospital already uses Ascribe as their solution partner for their Pharmacy and Medicines Management systems, Ascribe’s Web Pharmacy solution is interfaced to an ARX Dispensing robot.

Brian Smith, Chief Pharmacist at The Royal Bolton Hospital said, “Ascribe’s eDischarge solution has been well accepted by the clinicians and has sped the discharge process, making beds available quicker.  The full integration between the ePrescribing of the discharge medication and the Ascribe Pharmacy system means that there is no manual re-entry of information saving staff time, increasing patient safety and reducing delays in patient discharges.  The whole process is now automated from the prescriber prescribing, right through to the robotic dispensing. The eDischarge solution is providing deep, clinically relevant, information instantly to the GPs and is enabling us to meet our CQUIN target.”

Stephen Critchlow, CEO of Ascribe commented, “This system in Bolton improves patient care by removing transcription errors, and informing carers across primary and secondary care. Not only does this meet their CQUIN target but it also deals with the complex areas of work flow as drugs are reconciled with admission drugs, prescribed and corrected before sending clear information to the GP. We are proud to work with the visionary team in Bolton to deliver this.”