Customer stories
Electronic Patient Record Viewer helping Medical Examiners and saving GPs hundreds of hours per year
Electronic Patient Record Viewer helping Medical Examiners and saving GPs hundreds of hours per year
Related Content
Medical Examiners at Royal Stoke University Hospital are using EMIS Web® Electronic Patient Record Viewer (EPR Viewer) to view medical records of deceased patients, helping them review and sign off death certificates and saving local GPs 6 hours a week.
Getting ahead of the curve with the new Medical Examiner System
As part of the Department of Health’s Death Certification Reforms, a new statutory Medical Examiner System is being rolled out later this year across England and Wales. From 9 September 2024 Medical Examiners will be responsible for reviewing and signing off death certificates and investigating all deaths that aren't investigated by a coroner.
Samuel Townshend, Deputy Head of Bereavement and Medical Examiner Services at Royal Stoke University Hospital, explains how his team have embraced this process early and managed to get ahead of the curve. Using EPR Viewer, his team have direct access to detailed patient medical records, enabling a comprehensive assessment of death, whilst also relieving GPs of a manual and laborious admin task.
We now have over 50% of practices referring into our service ahead of the statutory rollout of the system in September. It’s a winner all-round."
Improving the quality of death certification
Before the introduction of EPR Viewer, the process was extremely challenging and time consuming, with GPs needing to manually complete a form in Microsoft Word for each deceased person, providing an overview of data surrounding the individual’s death so that Medical Examiners can review and sign off.
Now Medical Examiners can do their investigations and reporting with the help of direct access to patient records. This is saving valuable time for GPs who no longer need to complete and submit the detailed forms. A local GP has told Samuel that this is freeing up 15 minutes per death, which can be put back into direct patient care.
Samuel commented: “Having access to the EPR Viewer has changed things enormously. We went from having 11 GPs on board who were regular referrers to now having over 50% of practices referring into our service ahead of the statutory rollout of the system in September. It’s really helped us achieve buy-in from our associated practices and has provided a depth of insight we didn’t have before, it’s a winner all-round.”
Royal Stoke University Hospital is a major trauma centre and sees around 4,000 adult patient deaths per year across a large geographical area covering Staffordshire, Cheshire, Shropshire and parts of North Wales, with an additional 3,500 deaths per year across the community. This could add up to 620 hours of GP time freed up each year once the scheme is fully adopted.
Access to the EPR Viewer has been hugely beneficial, without it we wouldn’t have been able to run this service in the way we want to, we are really lucky."
Providing independent scrutiny of deaths
The aim of the Medical Examiner System is to improve the overall quality of death certification. It also impacts the broader healthcare economy by helping to identify misdiagnosis, errors and issues, whilst granting insight on a local level regarding trends and patterns, outbreaks, conditions, requirements and community needs.
EPR Viewer is helping the team at Royal Stoke University Hospital provide better safeguards for the bereaved and work more efficiently with their local practices.