Clinicians are being encouraged to move away from paper and email to shorten lead times for patients receiving home medication deliveries by moving across to a secure online clinician gateway.

The Clinicians’ Gateway, developed by clinical homecare specialist HealthNet Homecare, allows clinicians to manage their patients’ homecare more easily. The company has around 150,000 homecare patients assigned to their service by hospital clinicians, who can now review and send invoices and prescriptions, register patients for homecare, create prescriptions, check delivery status and run reports using the Gateway.

“At the present time, those not using a digital platform like the Clinician Gateway have to email or send paper copies of registration forms; have to call up to get information on their patients or request information via email,” explains Sam Cockayne, Sales Director, HealthNet Homecare.  

“That can be very time-consuming. The Gateway can speed up the process by giving them direct access to their patients’ information from the computer in front of them.”

Recent updates to the system include easy to view patient notes, an administration page so you can manage all staff involved, an improved search function and the ability to send prescriptions electronically using an E-Sign facility. Other upgrades include:

• Improved search function accessible from the dashboard, which includes a ‘Search All’ option.
• A prescription reminder page.
• Improved registration page with more ad-hoc clinical questions.
• New, easy to view patient notes.
• New improved prescription template, based on the National Standard Template.
• Easy access viewing of all prescriptions for a patient.
• Administration page – Allowing you to manage your staff’s access to the portal.

The Gateway’s E-sign facility is particularly useful.

“It’s quicker because you can get prescriptions approved electronically. And because it’s not a paper copy, you don’t have to rely on people being in the same place to sign it,” continues Sam.

“If you wanted to change a patient's information, currently you would have to write an email, wait for that to be picked up and then for that to be responded to. If you needed to register a patient, you'd have to put that in the post or emailed, but either way, require scanning. With the Gateway, you can register a patient without any paper copies. There’s no sitting on a call or waiting on an email or typing out that email, all of which is time-consuming. To register a patient now, with the patient in front of you, you could go on to the Gateway and do so in five minutes.”

“The key point is that it’s simple, user-friendly. We have never come away from a demonstration with somebody saying it is complicated. It's built for them to be as straightforward as possible, so we want to encourage as many clinicians as possible to arrange a demonstration because we are confident that they will find it transformative.”

The Clinicians’ Gateway, though, is also useful for hospital administration teams, to see invoices, and statements, but also for prescribers, nurses, anybody who needs to view or edit patient information to see their delivery and prescription information.