Health informatics

11 SHORTER WAITING LISTS AND RAISED PRODUCTIVITY

The implementation of an electronic patient record (EPR) system at NHS Rotherham was intended to make patient information available more easily to clinicians and carers, but created major challenges for some of the Primary Care Trust’s (PCT) community services organisation. Paul Chapman, Clinical Lead for Information Technology, The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust, explains how the Trust got around some of the problems by introducing digital pens.

The new system required all patient information to be entered via a keyboard, which was a fundamental change for services such as physiotherapy, where practitioners traditionally record a lot of information in drawings and diagrams. What Rotherham’s ...