In this second tip on speeding up EMIS Web, we got EMIS to look at some of our PCs and discovered that there is a common – but often overlooked reason for PCs to slow down.
It’s all to do with keeping EMIS Web workflow clean!
We got our IT facilitators to go round and support practices with this tip and it made a noticeable impact to speeding up EMIS!
This made a big difference to lots of our practices – and it’s all about good housekeeping.
In workflow – where some of us don’t often venture, there are lots of tasks that add up and we don’t often clear – and gets left for someone else to deal with!
Well, if someone’s responsibility could be to look at this section regularly and support staff to keep the workflow clean, tidy and avoid letting tasks build up, it can have a significant impact on speed!
Now if you go in to EMIS Workflow, you will need to enable a user to have global access to the folders – once you have this, you can set about looking at the global view for each section – take a look at this – it’s not good:
Here you can see a number of outstanding tasks. These were the suggestions we put together locally:
Tasks / Lab reports
Asking all clinicians to get this down by looking at their own list – some legacy locum inboxes also needed to be cleared.
Medicines Management
This is usually well controlled and means that you are processing medication requests in a timely way – if you have a large number here, then look at how processing medication requests is happening and this may need to be improved.
GP2GP
Most of these are successful integration entries that need to be completed.
Referrals
This is often where legacy entries may have been overlooked – needs someone to go through and process these in turn. Again a high count probably means that you may need to look at how you manage referrals within your practice.
Test Requests
For us locally, these are mainly TQuest requests that have been made and not completed – it may be worth looking to have a process that anything over a set time period (eg 4 weeks) is removed.
SCR
This needs someones task to look at these and process them – usually tend to be consent confirmations.
Maybe worth adding to set all people who need Global view on some workflows to have it default to not global view. This way they only load the extra tasks when they really need to look at them.
Good point – as global view will help some in the practice to have an oversight as to who is or isn’t completing tasks!
Do completed tasks have to be archived and does that make a difference? I’ve asked this question many times and seem to get a different answer every time I ask it. We have over 1 million completed tasks so need to know if it’s worth addressing.
Also with referral management many of the tasks can’t be completed without deleting the original referral entry which is wrong. This happens if you do the e referral through EMIS (task created) but add the letter via the website.
Really good points!
On the tasks – i’ve understood it to compete uncompleted tasks so that it comes out of the workflow – we’ve not been advised about the archiving of these – our facilitators have noticed differences in completing and minimising tasks per se and not archiving.
You are right on referral management – and these need to be addressed – we had an exercise in some of our practices to go through and over time complete the referral tasks – by (individually) going into each referral and completing the referral task in EMIS – by just adding a comment (referred outside EMIS) and authorising. And alongside this getting pathways to add letters from within EMIS and not outside through eRS.