Doctors at UCLH have developed bespoke software that will allow them to rapidly review and document clinical decisions about large numbers of patients.
The Electronic Clinical Infections Database (EIcid) was developed with Open Health Care UK using funding from the BRC and UCL. The database is currently being used by the infectious diseases, microbiology and immune teams at the trust.
Up until now clinicians have used systems to record data that are made up of a combination of Excel spreadsheets, Microsoft Access and T-Cards with written information on. However these serve mostly as an ‘aide memoire’ for staff so they know what the main issues are, what jobs need doing and what results are outstanding.
EIcid enables systems to cross-talk, for example if a team of microbiologists has given advice on a patient this can be seen by an infectious diseases doctor, so there is a reduced risk of what are known as ‘data-silos’.
The EIcid will also make it easier to extract data. Information is automatically captured and stored making it possible to generate custom reports on key performance indicators and multiple users can edit a file at the same time.
Dr Vanya Gant, a consultant microbiologist and the trust's director for the infection division, explained: “Previously, decisions on patients recorded on paper records were fine for clinical purposes, but not for maximising our ability to utilise routine clinical data to feed into improving clinical care. The system allows me to rapidly review and document clinical decisions about large number of patients who have complex infection related issues. This week my ward round was 70 patients but using this interface I was able to review these patients with my haematology colleagues clearly and in only two hours.”
The system was created by Open Health Care UK, a digital communications business set up by Dr Carl Reynolds, an NIHR academic clinical fellow in respiratory medicine at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. Dr Reynolds said: “We're proud to be demonstrating the value of modern user-focused design, open source and open governance in an NHS IT service”.
Dr Michael Marks, a specialist registrar at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, has been involved in the development of the system. Dr Marks said that the goal was to significantly improve the way doctors entered information: “It aims to replicate an interface that junior doctors, who do most routine data entry, are familiar with whilst simultaneously helping the hospital and the division achieve its strategic aims. We started by looking at the current word document/paper forms that people were using and had to work out what data is required for day to day work but importantly also what data is required to inform service development and research”.
