In the brave new world where pathology testing will be provided by X number
of large labs carrying out GP work and Outpatient work, and by each hospital
having its own smaller lab to carry out InPat/A&E/Day case tests ....
What model will be used to provide secondary care access to patients primary
care results, and also provide primary care access to secondary care results?
Large labs can quite easily use OrderComms (via the present suppliers eg
Anglia & Indigo4) to bring in demographics with NHS numbers + test requests
into the large labs LIMS, and provide electronic results via PMIP (presently,
but via a national roll-out of the future HL7v3 direct OrderComms via the TMS
at some stage in the future). So the large labs can process primary care tests
from far & wide.
I would suggest that Lab-to-Lab links would provide a way of allowing the
smaller secondary care hospital labs to book in outpatient requests as send-
aways & then send the specimens to the area's large lab for processing. The
results could then be sent back over the lab-to-lab link back to the secondary
care hospitals environment for publishing via their present routes to their
secondary care users.
BUT how to we sensibly provide in each catchment area an integrated view of
Primary & Secondary care results to the health care staff in their own
catchment area????
Our lab presently provides this integrated view of primary & secondary care
results to our health care staff across the county. I have been informed that
the integrated view is not common across the country - if this is the case,
something needs to be done!
Maye the large labs will have to use copy-to's on all GP work so that it gets a
copy sent back to the secondary care hospital connected to that GP
Practice? Plus the small labs will have to put copy-to's on all secondary care
work to send copies to the relevant GP Practice system?
The only other route is to send all results to the spine SCR - but when will
that be available?
Any thoughts?
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