BOPDHB Project: Electronic Sending of Outpatient Clinic Letters to General Practice

COMMUNICATION TO GENERAL PRACTICE BOPDHB Project: Electronic Sending of Outpatient Clinic Letters to General Practice The Bay of Plenty District Health Board will start sending approved outpatient clinic letters, for patients, who are registered with a BOP local General Practice, electronically through HealthLink by the end of October 2018.

This project is endorsed by the BOP Information Systems (BOPIS) group.

The aim of this project is to reduce the time elapsed between the patient appointment and practice notification and reduce the dependence and the cost of paper systems.

If your practice receives electronic mail through EDI now you should not encounter any issues with receiving BOPDHB clinic letters. We already send discharge summaries to EDI, however the clinic letter will arrive as a PDF document.

We have been testing electronically sending these letters to three test medical practices and addressing any issues as we have encountered them. We are continuing to monitor their progress against our data validation systems.

Now the DHB has more up to date PHO enrolment data we have been undertaking data integrity reporting that matches PHO enrolment data to what the DHB has recorded for an NHI in our patient management system. Where there is a discrepancy we are changing the practice information recorded in our system. We want to eliminate medical practices receiving documents that are not for patients enrolled with them. An escalation email has been put in place should a document be incorrectly received.

The initial scope of this project is for the electronic sending of outpatient clinic letters and review documents. We hope we can extend the scope to include operation notes and cc’ed documents to General Practice.

Thank you for working with us. We think this is very exciting and know our patients will benefit from their medical practice having DHB clinical information available to them in a timelier manner when providing care.

Dale Shewan Change Manager Service Improvement Team Bay of Plenty District Health Board September 2018