East Cheshire NHS Trust launches electronic outcomes recording

East Cheshire NHS Trust has gone live with digital appointment outcome recording for outpatients.

The trust has launched eOutcomes from Intouch with Health to replace paper outcome forms and increase clinic efficiency by digitally capturing appointment outcomes and procedure codes at the end of an outpatient appointment.

eOutcomes has been launched alongside other solutions within the Intouch Patient Journey Platform – Flow Manager, Check-in, Calling, Wait Times and Room & Resource Manager.

“Our paper-based process was resulting in delays in the recording of patient outcomes and next steps.”

Vicky Bond,  General Manager for Clinical Support Services at the trust, said: “Our paper-based process was resulting in delays in the recording of patient outcomes and next steps.

“Using eOutcomes has resulted in faster, more accurate clinical outcomes being recorded. We have gone from a situation where the recording of clinical outcomes could be delayed up to several weeks, to them being recorded within 24 hours.

“This eliminates any risk of  follow up instructions being lost and supports the accurate and timely recording of activity..”

She added: “Clinicians we have engaged with so far have provided extremely positive feedback. They are not finding any significant increase in time to complete the digital form and they recognise the benefits in terms of patient safety and accuracy of data.”

“Using eOutcomes has resulted in faster, more accurate clinical outcomes being recorded. We have gone from a situation where the recording of clinical outcomes could be delayed up to several weeks, to them being recorded within 24 hours.”

Kev Fletcher, Director of Patient Flow at VitalHub UK, the parent company of Intouch with Health, said: “We are delighted to partner with the East Cheshire NHS Trust team again on this latest expansion of the Intouch Patient Journey Platform.

“eOutcomes is specifically designed to replace paper outcome forms with a digital alternative that is extremely easy-to-use, delivers quality improvement by accurately capturing appointment outcomes and procedure codes, and instantly updates a trust’s patient administration system (PAS) at the point the clinician finishes with the patient.

“Not only is this process much more efficient than paper forms, but it also ensures all the data required from a finance perspective is recorded at the point of care delivery.”

East Cheshire NHS Trust has over 2,500 staff working across community settings and its three hospital sites - Macclesfield District General Hospital, Congleton War Memorial Hospital and Knutsford and District Community Hospital.