PPM+ ensures our clinicians are able to view a single patient record which includes city-wide information from a number of different organisations, providing a rich, informed view of our patient’s wider needs.
Hear more about the features and benefits from Ben Huntly, Advanced Clinical Practitioner.
PPM+
My name is Ben, I’m one of the Advanced Clinical Practitioners for AMS. I specialize within the Pancreas Team.
PPM is fundamental and integral to everything we do with patients these days. It just allows us to have all the information in one place at one time. It allows us to do a ward round with one device as opposed to opening multiple devices or holding multiple files. We can access information easily, we can intervene with that information quite quickly, and we can then make a clear plan and get everything in place on that one system. So it just helps pull everything together and it impacts the patients massively.
We can use PPM when we’re communicating with GPs or when we’ve got patients that are transferring in from other hospitals. As more and more hospitals come on using PPM as a tertiary referral centre, it allows us to look at what’s been said, what’s been happening, what results have been there, all over in other trusts before patients arrive. That’s a massive benefit for our patients. It means that we can transfer and intervene at the right time. It means we don’t have to redo a set of bloods or redo a CT scan just because we haven’t got the correct information available to us. All that information can be there for us to see as the patient arrives and for us to plan appropriately, even before that patient arrives. It just helps speed up that clinical care.
On the flip side of that, for discharge, it allows me to see a patient in clinic, for example, and be able to review the entirety of their admission. I can look at all the different episodes of care, whether that be nursing, whether that be medical, whether that be physiotherapy, occupational therapy, pharmacy, nutrition. We can see all that information and it really does help to give us a complete picture when we’re reviewing patients in clinic, and that just gives the patient so much confidence in the care that we provide.
It keeps everything in one place. It means I’m not having to talk through while carrying 75 sets of notes on ward rounds. It means that I’m not getting back to the end of a 50-60 patient ward round thinking, “What did we say about that first gentleman we saw?” and then having to judge sometimes through three or four wings of the hospital to read those notes. I can see that online in front of me. If I get a bleep about somebody, I can log on, I can look at the information, and make much better communication there, as opposed to, “Oh, well, um, I think… but I’ll have to go and read his notes.”
It makes ward rounds much easier. I can take a laptop with me, I can look at blood results. If the consultant or registrar decides to want a CT scan, I can request it on ward round as part of that PPM process. Clinical notes, I’m a massive fan of clinical notes. It’s fantastic. It means that all the information I need is right there. I can filter it by specialty. I can filter it by whether it’s medical, surgery, medicine, gastroenterology, pancreas, general surgery. It keeps everything right there, right at the bedside when we need it. If a patient says, “Oh, I had that ultrasound yesterday,” I could look at that there and then, as opposed to having to go back and come back to the patient. We can give those results much quicker.
It means all that information comes together, it’s all tied up, and it just gives us that confidence that when we’re giving information to patients, when we’re making clinical decisions, that all of that information is together at that time and ready for us to move forward. It means we can put a plan in place. If I’m off today and I come in tomorrow morning, I can have reviewed most of the notes before we even start on ward rounds.
If I get a phone call out of hours when I’m at home and with remote access, I can log on and I can look at a patient’s trends because it’s fine getting a phone call saying, “Oh, this man’s blood pressure is this,” but is it new? Is it compromising his heart rate? Has it been like this before? Is there anything that’s causing it? And it allows us to view all of that information remotely, whether that be from another ward, whether that be in the office, on the same ward, or at the bedside, wherever that is.
And it allows us to make clinical decisions much easier, much quicker, and much more decisive for the patients.
It makes that patient journey so much better. This is the patients we’re all here for. The patient care is much better when it’s on PPM. We’ve had a gentleman present recently, and we didn’t have a clue what he’d done 20 years ago, but in 20 years’ time, I’ll be able to see everything he did on PPM.