The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust has integrated the Electronic Referral Service (eRS) with its Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system, speeding up its referral processes and enhancing patient care.
The automation has also resulted in a 50 per cent reduction in the effort required to process referrals, delivering significant time savings for the trust.
With growing demand for triage and advice and guidance services, and increased referrals post pandemic, the trust recognised the need for a more efficient system to manage referral documents and data.
The previous process had relied on staff manually downloading referral documents and entering them into patient records, a time-consuming and error-prone task.
The trust needed an automated solution that would reduce the manual workload and improve accuracy and patient safety
In collaboration with the trust, Answer Digital developed an eRS integration that allows NHS trusts to automate the extraction of referral documents and data directly into their EPR or document management systems.
By automating the retrieval of referral letters and supporting documents, the integration has significantly reduced manual workload with improved data accuracy, in addition to enhancing patient safety.
James Rawlinson, Director of Health and Informatics at The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust, said: “The vision for the project was to align with NHS standards and automate the entire workflow, streamlining the download of referral documents from eRS and uploading them directly into the EPR.
“The improvements are not only beneficial to the patients, but they have also resulted in significant data entry time savings of between 25 and 40 per cent.
“As a result, administrative staff who were previously responsible for manual data entry have now been redeployed to more valuable roles, further enhancing productivity at the trust.”
Paul Wye, Head of AI at Answer Digital, added: “The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust was keen to enhance their patient care and reduce the administrative burden of administration work, from experience we knew this automated integration could bring some fantastic results for them.
“It completes repetitive tasks and has reduced the risk of human error in data processing, allowing healthcare professionals to focus more on delivering quality care.
“This solution not only streamlines administrative tasks but also builds patient trust by ensuring that data is handled accurately and efficiently. The modular design of the system ensures that other NHS trusts using InterSystems integration engines can also easily adopt the solution.”
The integration with the eRS FHIR API and NHS CIS2 smartcard authentication was built using InterSystems HealthShare and Java.
The source code is freely available on GitHub under an Apache open-source license, enabling wider adoption across the NHS.
