Customer stories
Community staff making contact with 70% more patients because of EMIS Mobile
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North Manchester Community Service, part of Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, has switched to EMIS Web, allowing them to implement EMIS Mobile. Almost 500 staff from different services across 11 locations, are now transforming care for more than 5,000 patients with new ways of working.
District nurses have increased their patient contacts by 50%, in just over a year from first beginning to use EMIS Mobile. They credit this to staff spending less time returning to the office to access and input information.
Among all community staff, the number of face-to-face or phone contacts has risen by 70% in the space of 12 months.
Going paperless
Vikki Stradling, district nurse and Optum (formerly EMIS) project facilitator said: “All of our teams are now paper light. Each district nurse is saving on average over an hour a day.”
Each district nurse is saving over an hour a day."
Before EMIS Mobile, community teams relied on paper records, returning to the office throughout the day to update the central computer record. One hundred and twenty-five members of staff, including district nurses, specialist nurses, podiatrists, Macmillan nurses, physiotherapists and the IV therapy team now use iPads for home visits, and update the record in real time. They all have read-write access to the same community patient record.
Implementing EMIS Mobile has been a massive improvement for our teams, meaning we can deliver a better and safer service for our patients. It has reduced the reliance on paper records across all of our services."
“We can now refer patients electronically, reducing the need to send faxes or make numerous phone calls. If a patient decides to attend a different clinic within North Manchester, their records are now available to our teams. Previously, we had to phone the clinic where their records were held and ask them to fax information to us.
Vikki explained that before EMIS Mobile, staff carried a box full of paper records. “It was time-consuming to find information, and we could not easily use the data to improve our service. At the end of their day, the teams would return to the office to update the records. Inevitably, there were never enough computers and it could take hours.”
Real-time records
Melanie Ince, community IT system manager at the Trust explained: "If you're a clinician calling at a patient's home in the afternoon, you can see exactly what has happened right up until the point you got there. If another healthcare professional has called earlier on in the day, you can see the details."
District nursing sister Linda Bailey said: “We can go into a patient’s home and we can have real-time access to all the notes from everyone in the community team. It makes our service much more efficient and gives us much more patient-facing time, which is what we need.”
It gives us much more patient-facing time, which is what we need."
The team is now planning to use the data to run activity reports and improve their service further. The data will also help them to better monitor their Key Performance Indicators and Commissioning for Quality and Innovation (CQUIN) targets.