Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust + Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Supporting seven hospitals
EPR optimisation
Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust have recently expanded their use of Alertive through a new Oracle Health EPR-integrated communication pathway for New Patient Opinions.
Designed to support faster specialty input for patients in the Emergency Department, the integration connects clinical conversations directly to the patient record, enabling structured acknowledgements, auditable communication and automatic documentation.
Timely specialty input is a critical part of urgent and emergency care, particularly when patients need to be assessed, admitted, transferred or discharged within national performance targets.
Historically, discussions about patient sequelae and specialty opinions have relied on outdated communication routes such as desk phones, callback loops and fragmented manual processes. These approaches can make it harder for clinicians to reach the right person quickly, understand the current clinical plan and evidence what has been discussed.
This part of the patient pathway can also be difficult to measure. Without structured data on who received the communication, how quickly they responded and whether the outcome was acceptance or further discussion, Trusts have limited visibility of where delays occur or which specialties and roles may need additional support.
As urgent and emergency care demand continues to rise, Imperial and Chelsea identified an opportunity to make the specialty opinion process faster, more transparent and easier to audit.
Alertive has been integrated with Oracle Health EPR to support a new alert type: New Patient Opinion.
When a New Patient Opinion alert is triggered, clinicians can complete a live lookup into Oracle Health to select and attach the correct patient record, removing the need to manually re-enter basic patient information to save time and reduce duplication.
A clearly formatted integration message informs clinicians that the conversation, once closed, will be stored in Oracle Health and become part of the patient record. The conversation must then be ended through a dedicated integration action, triggering transcription, PDF generation and insertion of a link into the patient’s structured notes within Oracle Health.
The pathway is designed to capture key data including site, recipient role, acknowledgement type and response time, creating the foundation for reporting, dashboards and future pathway optimisation.
Emergency Medicine Consultant
Alertive integrating with our electronic health records gives us the capacity to have an audit trail of communications with detail and accuracy that has not occurred before; our patient-flow KPIs and medico-legal cover get enhanced with the increased accuracy, as well providing hard evidence for where service improvement or funding is required.
North West London Acute Provider Group Deputy CIO
Clinicians can input an MRN, append that patient’s details into the chat… when they’re done with that conversation, they can save and close it and it goes to the electronic patient record.
The New Patient Opinion integration creates a more structured and measurable approach to specialty communication.
The project is planned to begin with a pilot for Emergency Medicine clinicians, patient flow coordinators and acute specialties on-call teams at Imperial and Chelsea, before wider rollout across inpatient teams.
The next phase will focus on validating the process at volume, supporting clinician education and capturing baseline performance so improvements can be measured.
Once optimised, the model is expected to scale across further sites and Trusts in North West London, with London North West and Hillingdon identified as next NPO sites. This creates the opportunity for consistent metrics, benchmarking and shared insight across the wider sector.
