In article <004d01bf06e2$d924b3e0$ace293c3@twleckuj>,
   Bruce Finlayson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> We are on the point of a major purchase of Footman Walker's A&E system.

> I would be very grateful if those with first-hand experience of the system could post the two best and two worst points of the system based on their own observations.

> Thanks....

> Bruce Finlayson


We have been running Footman Walker's AEII system at St James's since
March 1996.  Footman Walker (FWA) transferred a lot of data from our
previous Trent A&E system and so we now have records on-line of 880,000
new patient visits since 1989.

Two best points :

1.  Reports.

The facilities for reports are excellent.  FWA supply a lot of
pre-written reports.  You also get the Crystal Reports software so you
can write your own reports or alter existing ones.  Some people find
Crystal difficult but it gets easier with practice!  Any FWA site is
welcome to use reports written at St James's.

Data from reports can easily be exported into spreadsheets, word
processors or other software.

The Automate report scheduler (which FWA initially wrote for St James's)
allows reports to be run automatically, which saves a lot of time and
effort.  We run several reports every night about the previous day's
patients.  There are also various statistical reports which
different people need weekly or monthly.


2.  The FWA User Group and help from other FWA sites.

Any FWA site can send people to the User Group meetings which allow you
to meet other people running the same system, moan about problems, make
suggestions and get ideas about how to do things better.

Many FWA sites are happy for people to phone to discuss ideas or visit to
see how they do things.  Richard Makower at Chester co-ordinates suggestions
for new software features.


Two worst points :

1.  Time taken to add new features (even those wanted by several FWA
sites).  Some improvements happen remarkably quickly but some take far
longer than seems reasonable.

2.  Flexibility. Some parts of the FWA system are easily configurable
(which means there are lots of choices to make when you set it up) but
some are less flexible than I would like.

Both these "worst points" are largely the result of the software used to
write AEII and should be better in the new Symphony software.  The FWA staff
are very friendly and helpful but unfortunately FWA are rather overstretched
at present trying to complete Y2K upgrades, look after existing sites,
install new sites and also develop Symphony.

FWA AEII is vastly better than our old Trent system, which was run by Istel. 
I don't know how we put up with Istel for so long.  We couldn't manage now
without our FWA system.


More comments available to anyone who wants them.

Robin

-- 
Dr Robin Illingworth
Consultant in Accident and Emergency Medicine
St James's University Hospital, Leeds



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