Clinically useful electronic patient record

Sir: We were delighted to see the report by Searle et al (Psychiatric Bulletin, April 2002, 26, 145-148). We too have had tremendous success with an almost identical system developed in collaboration between the IT department and clinicians (Hunt, 2002). We now have discharge summaries, patient letters and Care Programme Approach reviews available networked across three London boroughs, and multiple sites. Like many others, we found that the patient-based IT systems on offer could not cope with storing and retrieving the complex clinical information that we all need when managing patients. However, using the network that was built to enable communication across the trust, we can now access detailed clinical information 24-hours a day when needed, and have gone a long way to ironing out the information problem caused by community teams being based away from in-patient units. The system has been quick and simple to implement and well-received by staff. The key difference with our project is that each patient has only one file, with multiple pages of separate letters within it. We suspect that this makes retrieval and searching somewhat easier. Interested people are welcome to contact us by e-mail in the first instance.