Choose and Book – good and bad

I am a GP who works in a practice in the New Forest with 12,500 patients and four hospitals within a 20 mile radius. I am also the chief executive of Wessex Local Medical Committee which represents 3,000 GPs working in the 420 practices in Dorset, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight and Wiltshire. Over the past two years I have used Choose and Book extensively as a GP...

A great leap forward

Stephen Miller, national medical director for Choose and Book, explains why Choose and Book is transforming the clinician-patient relationship-it all starts in the GP’s surgery when referring the patient to a specialist...

The Electronic Prescription Service

Release 1 of the Electronic Prescription Service is now technically enabled in around 80 percent of GP practices and pharmacies. The evolution from paper to electronic prescriptions continues with Release 2 which will enable real, tangible benefits to be realised, says Alex Trewhitt...

Keep NPfIT

Dr Simon Eccles, a consultant in Emergency Medicine at the Homerton Hospital in Hackney, East London and a national clinical director for NHS Connecting for Health, describes the benefits the programme is bringing for patient care right across the health service...

NPfIT for purpose?

Good IT systems are essential to medicine. Computers are already widely used in hospitals and general practice, but the full potential of modern IT has not yet been harnessed by the health services in most countries, says Dr Martyn Thomas...

Is EPMA enough?

Electronic Prescribing and Medicines Administration is a safety system. The mandating of approved drug names and complete, legible and unambiguous prescriptions has been shown in some studies to reduce medication errors by around 60% 1…but is that enough, asks Niall Poole...

Electronic records “dramatically” speed up Chlamydia treatment cycle

The introduction of electronic patient records can “dramatically” speed up the Chlamydia treatment cycle, more than doubling the proportion of people treated within two weeks of a test result, reveals research published ahead of print in Sexually Transmitted Infections.

The researchers base their findings on over 100 sexual health clinic patients, who were either treated in the first three months of 2007, before electronic patient records were introduced, or during...