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29th May 2013 – Ascribe, leading provider of clinical IT solutions and services, is pleased to announce the ‘Go Live’ of its market leading Unscheduled Care solution at County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust.

Ascribe has enabled the trust to go paperless in the ED at the Durham University Hospital site, with the medical and nursing staff recording all their notes into the Ascribe clinical noting module, eNotes, saving time and reducing printing costs.  All the nursing observations with calculated MEWS and PEWS scores are part of the electronic nursing record, with charts created within Ascribe software.  Ascribe also provided the specialised Business Change consultancy services to support this process.

The first department in a multi-phase project went live with Ascribes Unscheduled Care solution on the same day as their new intake of junior medical staff, ensuring that they would develop their clinical experience using the latest technology. Ascribe’s Unscheduled Care solution now provides County Durham & Darlington clinicians with a rich clinical information system that tracks patients from their point of first contact through to discharge from the Emergency Department.

The solution is fully integrated with the Trust Ascribe PAS providing full sharing of demographic data between both systems.  The system draws upon clinical and administrative patient data from multiple sources, which is planned to include the Summary Care Record in a later phase. The solution captures all clinical aspects of the Patient Journey and automates the generation of clinical reports, freeing clinicians to focus on providing care. Ascribe’s specialist implementation team have also worked with the trust to develop and deliver a fully electronic workflow for medical, nursing, allied health and administrative staff.

The Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt set a goal for the NHS to be paperless by 2018 to help the NHS save billions of pounds a year. Calls for a paperless NHS have also come from PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the NHS Commissioning Board; in addition to cost savings, there are also clear benefits to patient care, as records can be accessed more easily and without fears of delay or loss.

“Ascribe is delighted that Durham & Darlington have gone paperless in their Emergency Department, we believe that providing clinicians with all the relevant information they need is essential to improving care decisions and ultimately improving health outcomes” said Stephen Critchlow, CEO of Ascribe.

Dr Christopher Burdess, Consultant in Emergency Medicine at the Trust commented “The accurate capture and easy accessing of data relating to each ED patient’s visit is vital in assessing our performance, and identifying areas and ways in which we can improve our service to patients. Electronic documentation is critical in ensuring the ED clinician has both the ability to accurately record and immediately access vital clinical information. Ascribe’s Symphony system amply fulfils this need.”

County Durham & Darlington now have a single interface for clinically managing patients across their Acute Emergency Departments at Durham University Hospital and Darlington Memorial Hospital. Interoperability is acknowledged as the cornerstone of improving clinical IT systems and Ascribe’s Health Application Platform connects the Unscheduled Care system to Ascribe’s EPR solution, providing a bidirectional demographic to speed up and improve the accuracy of patient registration, and improving patient safety by ensuring every patient has a hospital number.