System C consortium completes ITK test

Four healthcare IT suppliers have successfully completed testing for the transfer of discharge summaries from hospital to social care using NHS Connecting for Health’s Interoperability Toolkit standard.

System C, Microsoft, Orion Health and Liquidlogic say their solution takes a patient discharge summary created on System C’s Medway PAS/EPR and sends it within an electronic message to Liquidlogic’s PRTOTOCOL integrated adults’ system via the Orion Rhapsody Integration Engine.

Microsoft’s Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator for Microsoft Office renders discharge information and supports the population of additional data items and encoding of clinical terms, before generating the required message.

The System C consortium is one of five consortia taking part in CfH’s project on standards for electronic discharge summaries as part of its Interoperability Toolkit. CfH published the standards in January.

Denise Harrison, sales and marketing director at Liquidlogic, said: “Under a paper-based system, it can take two or three weeks for the information to be transmitted,.

"By that time, a patient could have undergone three episodes of care in the community without the care provider necessarily having a clear picture of their status. This solution will improve this significantly."

Dr Ian Denley, chief executive of System C, said the solution was an exciting step forward in the integration of care across organisational barriers.

He added: “Linking disparate systems in this way to provide a simple discharge summary is going to make an immediate impact on the quality of care, on prevention and on institutional efficiency.

"It’s also a powerful demonstration of suppliers working quickly and efficiently together for a common cause.”

Graphnet Health announced at the end of March that its consortium had been the first of the five consortia to completed proof of concept witness testing, delivering discharge summaries from hospitals to GP practices.

All hospitals are expected to deliver discharge summaries to GPs within 24 hours from the beginning of this month, although it is thought the majority have failed to reach that target.