Standardising care with 10 new community clinical templates

Via the Healthcare User Group (HUG), we identified that most of our community customers were  investing significant time and resource into building data entry templates for their users. The content is often similar, but with no assurance that it’s comparable data, due to the different ways each customer templates and defining the way the data is captured. Which is why we’ve worked to help make things easier and to improve the quality of the information that’s recorded.

Consistent and reportable data

The aim of the project was to produce a suite of standardised national clinical data templates tailored to community users. These templates now ensure:

• ease of data entry for the clinicians/users
• that the information recorded is consistent and captured in a standardised way
• data adheres to required formats and is structured in a defined way
• fully reportable.

Patients also benefit by their information being recorded in a consistent way as it’s easier for clinicians to correctly interpret the data, and share information with different teams and organisations.

Having data that is fully reportable also means it’s easier to highlight service improvements and development. By having a standard range of clinical templates, organisations can save time and money by not having to start from scratch building their own templates, and best practice is shared between EMIS Web users.

Making it happen

The HUG has been integral to the project, determining the priority of the templates created and nominating subject matter experts to define the content of the templates on behalf of the HUG. They’ve collaborated with clinicians and our clinical implementation specialists to ensure the templates are built to meet national requirements where possible.

The creation of the first phase of community templates has also allowed the ongoing process for subsequent work in this area to be much better defined, and this process can be clearly communicated to our users in a much more meaningful way now.

Ongoing development of further templates is already underway to build up a full suite across many specialist clinical areas.

Chair of the HUG, Jackie Lucas, said: “Creating a standard library of clinical templates for all disciplines is out first big HUG influence, driven by EMIS Web users’ knowledge, need and commitment. Community clinical content within the system has been lacking up until now and we know already what EMIS Web is capable of in primary care. We’re looking forward to the launch of these new clinical templates and hearing feedback from our users as we move on to support future developments.”