Customer stories
Smooth transition, stronger care: making the move to EMIS Web
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Changing to a new clinical system brings opportunities to improve efficiency, streamline processes and enhance patient care. It’s natural for practice staff to feel a little apprehensive about the transition, which is why careful planning, and the right support are important – something our teams are experts at delivering.
West Quay Medical Centre in Wales has embraced this change, unlocking the potential for improved workflows, joined-up care, and better patient outcomes by switching to EMIS Web®.
EMIS Web enables practices to work more efficiently. Intuitive and easy to use, it supports primary care teams to make informed decisions about patient care, simplifies appointment management, enhances reporting and ensures seamless data sharing with other healthcare providers, ultimately helping practices deliver safer and more effective care.
The process of moving to EMIS Web was very slick. The communication was spot on, and the timeline was 100% accurate, which was important in managing patient expectations.
“Knowing the exact key dates allowed us to communicate to our patient population very, very well. It also gave us time to make sure all our staff had the appropriate training. We knew what we had to do and when we had to do it.”
Preparing for go-live
Getting staff buy-in and involving them in the transition process is crucial to the success of a new clinical system. Ensuring that everyone feels supported and engaged from the start helps create a smoother transition and maximises the benefits of the new system.
One key step is giving staff early access to EMIS Web in a test environment ahead of go-live. This allows them to explore the system, get comfortable with its features and build confidence ahead of the switch. Gareth and team found this particularly useful during their migration preparation: “Because we had access to some of our data in EMIS Web beforehand, it gave us more of an idea of what we’d be seeing.”
Support at your fingertips
Practices in Wales have access to Optum Help Centre, an online portal that includes training materials, release notes, and software update information. Gareth adds: “Just having access to something like Optum Help Centre and being able to familiarise yourself with the system before go-live puts people at ease.”
As standard, practices migrating to EMIS Web receive 10 days of training spanning before, during and after go-live. It covers topics such as how to prepare for migration, demonstrations of test scenarios, how to use the system, with the opportunity to troubleshoot problems as well get hints and tips, and trainers also direct users to Optum Learn, a learning portal with country and product specific modules, for self-study. The aim is to ensure practices are fully functional at go-live, providing a solid foundation for further training and enabling them to develop their system knowledge post go-live to optimise system usage.
Gareth added: “The Optum trainers were brilliant. They were knowledgeable and knew exactly what they were doing. The collaboration between them and DHCW to get us up and running was crucial.”
Looking to the future
As part of their primary care digital transformation strategy DHCW are introducing the Electronic Prescription Service (EPS), which is available in EMIS Web. This was one for the deciding factors for the practice, as Gareth explains: “EPS was an example of what drew us to EMIS Web. It’ll make things more efficient from a prescribing point of view. You wouldn’t believe how many paper prescriptions get lost, with EPS we’ll not only benefit from being able to track where a prescription is, but it’ll make the whole prescribing process much more streamlined for patients, too.
The next logical step is to move to EMIS-X when it becomes available in Wales. I was really excited to learn about it at a recent conference, and it was interesting to see some of the features. It’s reassuring as we’ve migrated that we’re seeing new developments on the horizon.”