Q. I continue to care for some of my long-term patients who are now resident in nursing homes. Some nursing homes have information systems, but they tend not to be GP friendly. Is there any way to improve this situation?

A. Over 90% of GP practices use an electronic patient record. GPs find it difficult and inefficient to switch to paper records when they attend to patients in nursing homes. A number of nursing homes are beginning to adopt electronic records, but the initial implementations tend to concentrate on nursing care records and supporting HIQA standards. GPs have requirements for nursing home systems that are not being fulfilled.

The GPIT Group, in collaboration with GPs who have an interest in nursing home care, has published a document that details the GP requirements for a nursing home clinical information system. The aim is to share this GP requirements document with all the nursing home software vendors to encourage them to consider developing these requirements in their systems. The intention is to start with important requirements that are achievable from a development perspective. With this in mind the document confines itself to 10 requirements:

• Support clinical notes
• Facilitate a summary of the patient's medical problems
• Provide the ability to code diseases
• Support the ability to scan and view previous letters and records
• Hold information on current medication
• Support the management of immunisation
• Support medication reviews
• Integrate laboratory and radiology reports
• Support an end of life care plan
• Ensure nursing home systems are accessible remotely.

This is a voluntary exercise; the National GPIT Group will not be accrediting nursing home systems. And, the nursing home system vendors will not be paid by the GPIT Group to develop GP requirements. This document is for informa-tion purposes. It is written to help the vendors of nursing home information systems understand what is important from a GP perspective. If a nursing home information system can achieve some or all of these GP requirements, it will improve their systems from a GP and patient care perspective.

The document is available from the GPIT section of the ICGP website. Navigate to www.gpit.ie and view the 'Publications and Reports' section.