Summary
Notify is an electronic clinical correspondence and audit system for hospital departments. It has been in use in the Department of Surgery in Banbury since 1997, for generating and storing clinical correspondence (mainly clinic letters and discharge letters to GPs, other doctors, patients etc), and for producing summaries of activity for audit. The system now contains the clinical correspondence on 32,000 patients, with data files totalling 170Mb. It is currently in use on about 25 PCs in four hospitals.
The principle of the system is that clinical information should be entered into hospital computer systems only once, so that accurate information is readily available at the patient level for individual care, and at the departmental level for statistical analysis.
The Notify server program communicates with the client PCs via TCP/IP. Core patient details are downloaded from PAS daily by FTP.
Advantages over paper records
• less typing: names, addresses etc. are imported automatically into letters
• easy retrieval: phone calls from GPs and patients can often be dealt with by reference to the electronic record via any Notify PC, with no need to try and locate the paper record
• series of cases for audit etc can be easily obtained via a simple search facility.
Features under development
• Additional statistical features for audit of clinical outcome data including 2, 5 and 10 year survival after cancer treatment
• Identification of high risk patient features
• User-definable data-entry screens for clinical data
• Upgrading of data entry to standard MS Windows format.
Notify has been jointly developed by Ian Campbell and Graham Appleton. The coding is by Ian Campbell.
Contact details
IC Statistical Services
Tel/Fax: (+44) 151 625 1449
Contact ian@iancampbell.co.uk
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