Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust (RD&E) has partnered with Surrey-headquartered firm CliniSys to enable GPs in Exeter and east and mid-Devon to order pathology tests electronically from its laboratories.

The trust plans to pilot the CliniSys Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE) solution with five surgeries, with the first one expected to go live this November. After, it will be rolled out to 47 practices in the area.

WHY IT MATTERS

“At the moment, GPs that send samples to the RD&E have to send a request card with them, and we have to manually input the information from the request card into our LIMS,” said Sarah Hodder, diagnostics cluster manager at the trust.

“That uses valuable staff time and can leave the process open to potential errors. In the future, GPs will still need to send us physical samples, but ICE will remove the paper that comes with them. It will be much more modern and streamlined.”

At the end of July, CliniSys announced that it would be providing the software to seven out of eight new laboratory hubs delivering the primary HPV screening service in England.

The company also signed a contract earlier this year with the South West London Pathology network to deploy its WinPath Enterprise laboratory information management system (LIMS).

THE LARGER TREND

RD&E provides acute and community services to more than 450,000 people, managing an acute teaching hospital and 12 community sites.

Last year, it received approval from NHS Improvement to proceed with a £42 million clinical transformation programme focused around the deployment of a new electronic patient record system from Epic, four years after selecting the U.S. vendor as its preferred EPR supplier.

The trust is expected to go live with the system in the summer of 2020. Once deployed, ICE will reportedly be integrated with the Epic Beaker LIMS module.

Cambridge University Hospitals, Great Ormond Street Hospital and University College London Hospitals (UCLH) are three other trusts in England that have picked Epic. UCLH went live with the system at the end of March.

ON THE RECORD

Dr Cressida Auckland, pathology clinical lead at Royal Devon and Exeter, said:

“We are really excited to offer this requesting service – as well as the obvious benefits in terms of simplicity and accuracy, we hope to use it to develop Peninsular-wide order sets that will ensure the best possible use of our pathology services, and improve our investigation and treatment of our patients.”