Basildon and Thurrock Live with New Integrated Emergency Care Module.

Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (BTUH) has gone live with the Medway Emergency Department system (Medway ED) to manage all clinical and administrative aspects of emergency care for the people of South West Essex.

The Trust introduced Medway ED to improve functionality and meet the national dataset requirements for emergency care, at the same time as delivering its wider strategy of a single platform EPR.  

Medway ED is fully integrated with the Trust’s existing Medway PAS, which increases visibility of department activity across the Trust and is expected to lead to improved clinical decision-making as well as improved efficiency. 

Nurses and clinicians at BTUH are using the new system to collect clinical data throughout the emergency department episode, including medical history, incident triage details, diagnoses, medications, investigations and treatments. It makes it possible to track patients as they move through the department and externally for investigations. It also generates discharge summaries which can be transmitted electronically directly to the GP. Users have access to radiology results via the module and pathology results will be introduced shortly. The software provides for the complete administrative and clinical management of patients, including clinical coding, major incident and RTC management, clinical and administrative alerting.

Dr Pushpakaran Munuswamy, chief clinical information officer at BTUH said:

The new integrated system brings with it improved access to patient records across BTUH.  Emergency department clinicians will gain immediate access to patient records with ability to request and view investigations in the same window. The workflow is paperless in ED minors section and we are aiming for entire ED to be paperless. This improves the efficiency of patient management and ED operations.

Beverley Bryant, chief operating officer at the System C & Graphnet Care Alliance, said:

I’m pleased Medway ED has been rolled out and it has taken Basildon and Thurrock one step closer to their single EPR.  It’s great to see that the integrated module is helping clinicians while they work by reducing the systems they need to log into and providing instant access to a patient’s historical record.