Paper results have had their day

27th September, 1999

The days of bits of paper carrying vital pathology test results are numbered at the West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds.

A £370,000 data handling computer system, which is currently being installed, will mean that soon doctors on wards and in GP surgeries will be able to receive essential information at the touch of a button.

The new equipment will greatly reduce the time that it takes for results to travel from laboratories to clinicians, bringing benefits to patients and staff and helping to reduce the amount of time that people have to spend in hospital.

The system is the latest part of more than  £600,000 that has recently been invested by the West Suffolk Hospitals NHS Trust in its laboratories whose staff receive 500,000 requests a year and carry out 2 million tests.

Pathology computer manager Mark Hale said that the new system will enable doctors to receive test reports on computer screens where and when they want them.

It will be linked to automatic analysers which are used for high volume routine work such as testing blood samples. Once verified by a laboratory technician and clinically authorised by a consultant results will be automatically made available via computer to the relevant clinician.

All test results will be fed into the system which will be capable of handling increasing numbers of automated analyses as equipment becomes more sophisticated.

"It will bring great benefit to patients," said Mr Hale. "The sooner test results are known the sooner treatment can begin and a patient can return home."

As well as being made available on ward based computers, the results will also be electronically transmitted to 10 GP surgeries in West Suffolk. The intention is that all local doctors will eventually be connected to the system.

The new equipment, said Mr Hale, will also allow reports to be produced quickly for such purposes as recording the incidence of specific diseases and conditions to be which will help in the national collection of data which looks at health trends.