Price: Demo free of charge - Full Product Individual licences £470 incl. VAT) Practice versions - cost depends on number of FTE Doctors & Nurses.
Contact: Semantic Technologies Limited, Enterprise House, Lloyd Street North, Manchester M15 6SE. Tel 0161 226 3859 Fax: 0161 226 6343 EMail: sales@clinergy.com WWW: http://www.clinergy.com
Spec (demo version): 3.5" disk drive, Win
95, 50Kb hard disc space, 800x600, colour monitor, mouse.
Clinergy GP claims to be a new easy to use data entry system for "paperless" clinical recording that works in synergy with a GP practice existing system, and that it will produce comprehensive notes with minimum typing and all data is automatically coded.
The demonstration goes some way to showing the capabilities claimed, but some features need user skills which are less than intuitive, and potential limitations of the software will need to be addressed in future developments.
This commercial software arises from the Pen & Pad project which was undertaken at the university of Manchester.
Installation from 3 floppy discs was easy, but slow if you are used to CD-ROMs. Perhaps it will be possible to download this from the companies web site in future? As well as installing the demonstration program there is a "ScreenCam" tour of the main features of the program and it includes the Lotus 123 software necessary to run it. This tour shows several screens from the program including graphical and picking list methods of data entry, however the user can not experiment with the tools in this tour.
The demonstration itself does enable a high level of interaction although some features of the diagnostic tools section were not available in this version of the software.
It includes symptoms, examination findings, diagnoses and procedures allowing these to be recorded quite easily, either by clicking on parts or systems of the body, selecting from picking lists, or typing in data. Where sections or data categories are not relevant to a patient they can easily be omitted. It looks as if a very comprehensive record of the patient could be entered. It was not clear if this system would, in the future, accept voice input or data captured by tools such as electronic thermometers, auto BP recording, or digital still/video cameras.
I encountered one problem, when entering an imaginary patient's blood pressure I was able to record a diastolic pressure, considerably higher than the systolic. It would be nice if the software included some checks on invalid entries.
In the interventions section, as well as clinical procedures (called actions), details of certificates, counselling, health advice, tests, IOS claims, advice and referral are available. There was no indication of whether the system would be able to automatically link to the outpatients booking computer of the local hospital, or generate referral letters.
A range of "check ups" were also available for screening clinics etc. In the well man clinic categories were available for smoking & alcohol consumption, TPR & BP, urine testing etc.
Once data has been entered a record for that patient can be easily generated, however I did not find this screen particularly clear or easy to use.
The program will automatically generate, and can display, the read codes for each data item, however it is not stated which version of the read codes, and whether compatibility with Version 3 which includes nursing & PAMs terms, has been tested.
The screens are generally clear and I particularly liked the graphical component. Individual nurses and students would require some training/exploration to be able to get the most out of it, but this demonstration may make it clearer to many how some of the aspects of data entry and electronic record keeping can be implemented.
Any practice considering moving to computerised records should include this
program in the range of those they evaluate.
Page Created 4.6.98
Last Updated: 30.8.03