Unity – the pain and the gain

December 21, 2018

By Dr Roger Stedman, Consultant Anaesthetics and Critical Care Medicine

In 2019 at Sandwell and West Birmingham we will be going live with our integrated electronic patient record ‘Unity’. For most of us working at the Trust this will be the biggest change in the way we practice our craft of caring for patients in the entirety of our professional careers. There is no doubt at all that this transition will be painful – and not just for those of us that are somewhat wary (healthily sceptical) of technology even at the best of times.

Unity is a complex tool, it takes time and patience to learn and get the best from it. The day we ‘go-live’ with Unity, despite all the fabulous training we have had, will be as if the entire organisation is turning up for a new job all on the same day.  Things will not run smoothly at first – things that we take for granted to happen won’t, or will take longer than usual. Workflows and care processes will seem to become laborious and clunkier. We will need a laptop – where before a pen and paper seemed to suffice. Patients will see us frowning at computer screens (or even swearing!) and they will be worried that we don’t seem to know what we are doing, and are paying more attention to the computer than to them. For a period of time patient flow will slow and we will get less done in outpatients and the operating theatre – this will cause its own problems too.

You may be thinking – is all this disruption worth it? Why should we bother, when what we currently do seems to work just fine? What’s so good about Unity that we should inflict this pain, and indeed risk, on the organisation?

Unity is an amazing tool that will ultimately transform the safety and quality of care we provide to patients. It doesn’t just document the care we provide electronically, it will help direct and support the care we provide. Hospitals that have implemented similar EPRs to Unity have seen incidents related to prescribing and administration of drugs almost completely disappear, they have seen the delivery of care pathways – such as sepsis and VTE become 100% reliable. The ability to get good clinical advice, either through communication with colleagues or through decision support means that patients will get faster diagnosis and the right treatment first time. The integration with records held in primary care and neighbouring hospitals means that we will have access to everything that is known about patients from the beginning of their admission – rather than the current ‘voyage of discovery’.

Unity is also the ultimate quality improvement tool. By moving the process of care from paper to electronic form – information that is currently locked in paper folders becomes live and accessible.  We will have knowledge of what and how well we are doing at providing care to patients and we will be able to use that knowledge to continuously improve the care that we give.

Unity will have a painful birth – but the result will be a beautiful thing that will grow and help us to grow into a better organisation that provides ever improving care to the patients we serve.

#hellomynamesis… Roger

#Unity – releasing time to care