It is widely held that electronic patient records (EPR) will become the norm for recording all interactions between the patient and healthcare workers in the future in developed countries with sufficient information technology (IT) resource. With the rapid rise in attendance at UK sexual health clinics, there has been a commensurate rise in the number of case records generated creating problems in storage and efficient record management within each clinic. EPR has theoretical advantages in terms of enabling rapid access to clinical information, uniformity of data collection and flexibility of data use/audit. We therefore decided to implement EPR in this service and we describe our experience.

SERVICE CHARACTERISTICS

The clinic provides services for both HIV and genitourinary medicine (GUM) patients. There are approximately 14 000 GUM attendances per annum, of which approximately 75% are new episodes of care for sexually transmitted infection (STIs) screening. The clinic is open access, largely walk-in, with a small number of bookable appointments. We serve an ethnically diverse, socially deprived, urban population in North West London.

PLANNING STAGE (6 MONTHS)

Having looked at the available options, we purchased the Blithe “Lilie” (Blithe Computer Systems, UK) patient management system ensuring that we had enough computers within the clinic for ready access by all staff …