Electronic Discharge Summaries for Derby NHS Trust

Derby Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has chosen Sunquest ICE™ software for the transmission of electronic discharge summaries to GPs within the Derby City and Derbyshire County Primary Care Trusts.

Tony Rowbottom, Senior Clinical Systems Manager at the Trust, explained: “Derby was one of the first trusts to send results electronically, and originally became involved with Sunquest through the Pathology Messaging Implementation Project (PMIP). Initially there were two file formats available for electronic reporting – ASTM1238 and EDIFACT. We used ASTM1238 when we began, but we moved to the ICE pathology test requesting module when EDIFACT became the national standard for PMIP.”

Tony continued: “As a result of a national directive, we needed to return discharge letters to GPs within 24 hours, and again chose ICE for this purpose. ICE allows medical staff to compile a discharge letter during a patient’s stay, with different people contributing as necessary, which is then dispatched electronically to the patient’s GP on discharge. The configuration was all in place so it was simply a case of adding another module. Sunquest is a good company to work with and we are very happy with the system.”

David Allcock, Vice President of International Sales & General Manager at Sunquest, added: “We are delighted that the Trust has found the ICE system so simple to implement and look forward to continuing to work with them in the future.”