News item

Liquidlogic Cuts Delivery Time of Hospital Discharge Summaries

Liquidlogic, a leading provider of collaborative software to the public sector, today announced that it has successfully accomplished proof of concept witness testing to produce the first health and social care link for adults services under NHS Connecting for Health’s (CfH) new standards for systems integration. The company is working alongside System C Healthcare, Microsoft® and Orion Health to provide a discharge summary from health care into social care teams. The consortium is one of five taking part in the NHS CfH project, and Liquidlogic’s involvement makes it unique as it is the only one involving a social care provider.

NHS Trusts have been told that from 1 April this year they should be delivering discharge summaries to GP practices within 24 hours of a patient leaving hospital. This new health and social care link will be an important step in the national drive to improve collaboration between healthcare providers and social services teams.

“We are delighted to be involved in a project which supports collaborative working between health and social care,” comments Denise Harrison, Sales & Marketing Director of Liquidlogic. “This is often a crucial piece of the jigsaw for Local Authorities who provide support to adults who have recently experienced a hospital stay. We are happy to support any process which increases the speed at which discharge information is provided to adults’ social care teams.”

The consortium’s Interoperability Toolkit (ITK) a framework which supports the sending of a patient discharge summaries from System C’s Medway PAS/EPR system which contains Microsoft’s Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator (CDSA) for Microsoft Office® to Liquidlogic’s social care PROTOCOL Integrated Adults’ System (IAS) via the Orion Health Rhapsody Integration Engine, reducing the traditional paper-based transmission time by up to three weeks. Under the current paper-based system, it can take up to two or three weeks after discharge for information to be transmitted between health and social care.
This link is an important step in the national drive to improve collaboration between healthcare providers and social services teams.

NHS Trusts have been told that from 1 April this year they should be delivering discharge summaries to GP practices within 24 hours of a patient leaving hospital.

“This is an exciting step forward in the real integration of care across organisational boundaries,” said Dr Ian Denley, chief executive of System C. “Linking disparate systems in this way to provide a simple discharge summary is going to make an immediate impact on quality of care and institutional efficiency. It is also a powerful demonstration of suppliers working quickly and efficiently together for a common cause.”

The Liquidlogic, System C, Orion and Microsoft consortium passed formal testing on 30 March.

31/03/10