A feature I’d like to see in EMIS (or other primary care EPRs)

I’m not sure how universal this is but quite a few practices locally have what I call a waiting room Health care assistant. Although they might have some booked patients the idea is they are free most of the time to help. Help do an emergency ECG, take urgent bloods, chaperone a patient, sit with a collapsed patient, restock a room, chase some results or a million and one other tasks.

The trick is to give them enough to do so you aren’t wasting money on employing them but have them free enough so they can drop everything and help. We often give our HCA work that can be interrupted. Ringing pts for a variety of reasons, restocking rooms, doing stock ordering and some admin/paperwork tasks. Nothing time critical then it can’t be interrupted.

Now one of the big jobs we like them to do when they aren’t busy helping is cruise the waiting room for missed QOF opportunities. Emis has a nice system of popup boxes that when a patient walks into my room it tells me things that are outstanding. E.g. a blood pressure, an asthma check Etc. Now some of these are going to happen anyway e.g. At the next asthma clinic, so there is no point me doing them but some that might be the only opportunity to capture that pts smoking status or blood pressure.

Now you’d like to think that every pt was captured by the GP, but let’s be frank they aren’t. Sometimes, the GP is running late, sometimes, the consultation is inappropriate to then bringing something else up sometimes the GP isn’t good at looking what is needed!

Well we like the HCA to look down the list of pts checked in and see if she could grab them? Do a quick BP, get some smoking status, offer a shingles vaccine, remind about smear etc. The problem and the need is its very hard to do this. There is an appointment screen that shows all clinicians working. You can see who has arrived, but you have to click on each person’s name and wait for the popup box to appear to know if they need anything.

What would be a really cool feature might be who is here and waiting and what do they need app. If on a separate screen a live list of pts checked in, with a list of what might be needed on them with perhaps some indication of how long they have to wait. If I’m running 45mins late and they are 6th to see me there is plenty of time to grab them!

As an afterthought  the other thing I’d like to do is work out which doctors ignore popups! If anyone has an idea how to run a search that shows, which pts with popups have been in, who they saw and who did and didn’t do the popups let me know!