Electronic discharge letters can be a key enabler for closer integration of care between all care givers:

• The TTO ("TO Take Out") request function ensures that requests are transmitted to pharmacy without the need to re-key information and on a timely basis, ensuring that the pharmacy has plenty of notice to plan and fulfill requests and that patient wait-times are minimised.
• Discharge Letters ensure that all relevant acute patient clinical data is transferred to the primary care provider after immediately upon discharge - reliably and securely, improving communication and integration between acute and primary care.

Orion Health's Electronic Discharge Summaries solution allows clinical staff to automatically to create a legible, accurate discharge summary letter, ready to be printed and given to patients as they depart the hospital. This letter is automatically pre-populated with data related to patients and their hospital encounter, and can be simultaneously transmitted to clinical databases and primary care providers.

Reduction in delivery times by up to 80 days

Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Trust were challenged by the need to improve the timeliness and accuracy of the discharge documentation being sent to the GPs in the North Nottinghamshire health community. By moving to a fully automated system with Orion Health technology, they have reduced delivery times for discharge letters by up to 80 days compared with using paper-based methods.

Benefits

• Standardises clinical documentation enhances quality and completeness
• Improves legibility of the medical record
• Streamlines clinical workflow
• Reduces paper
• Improves communication of electronic information to other healthcare providers
• Provides security of the medical record

Letters are pre-populated with data from hospital information systems

The automatic pre-population of fields means that repetition is avoided and accuracy is improved. Letters are automatically filled with information from common sources-patient details from the existing Patient Administration System (PAS) lab results from the laboratory system, and prescriptions from the pharmacy system.

Electronic Transmission means secure and timely communication with Primary Care

Discharge summaries can be sent electronically to primary care providers, and copied to other interested clinicians, by secure HL7 transmission, or by fax or e-mail. Alternatively they can be printed and sent by postal mail.

The use of standard clinical messaging formats such as HL7 ensures that discharge summaries are transmitted in a standard format and can be automatically integrated into the primary care provider's Practice Management System.

Customisable templates and data entry forms

Orion Health's Electronic Discharge Letters solution supports the creation of customized templates so that clinicians from each specialty can design one or many discharge summaries to meet their particular needs. Administrators build these templates within the system, incorporating pre-populated data with free text sections and data entry forms, which may have mandatory components.

A customised template will prompt the authorizing clinician to include relevant data for that specialty (for example, a discharge INR and date of next blood test for a patient discharged on Warfarin).

Creation of interim documents and future amendments

Interim discharge summaries can be created and finalized at a later date, allowing busy clinicians to make the most of their time. Amendments can be made to finalized documents as the need arises, with the revised details being messaged to the primary care provider. Amendments are fully audited, and changes can be traced back to the clinician who made them.

Selecting Coded Diagnoses

Clinicians can search a coded database, such as ICD-10AM, for specific diagnoses. Soprano EDS supports free text and key word searching. Alternatively the diagnosis can be described by free text.

Site-specific subsets of diagnosis codes can be designed by individual Trusts to suit their operational requirements.

Recording Discharge Medications