Safe, efficient order communications with ICE

ICE is a web-based requesting and reporting system relied upon by thousands of healthcare professionals across primary, secondary and community care. The application supports all platforms including PC and mobile devices. The primary use of ICE is to provide you with an electronic requesting platform to order diagnostic tests and procedures within both primary and secondary care.  ICE is heavily relied upon by all our customers for pathology-based tests, and is also proven with a wide range of diagnostic specialisms including radiology, cardiology, endoscopy and a variety of other auxiliary services.

Widespread integration

ICE integrates with all the key clinical systems around laboratory, radiology, mental health, EPR, primary care and sexual health, with over 35% coverage in NHS Trusts for acute ordering. This gives you the freedom to rely on best of breed systems for your individual disciplines, while taking full advantage of a single, coordinated test and reporting system across your health system or Trust.

The ICE product suite provides additional functionality to make it easier for you to manage patient information efficiently and effectively, including:

• Electronic view
  • View of the patients’ records including diagnostic test, procedure or examinations information. Additional information can be presented including patient alerts and clinical documentation such as discharge summaries
• Assessment and escalation of results
• Ability to manage patients
  • Generation of patient lists based on clinician, location, clinical team or patient status
• Refer patients between departments
• Generation and transmission of  results and clinical documentation including discharge summaries to primary care
• Support for sample collection

Requesting

One of the primary functions of the ICE product is the requesting element. This enables diagnostic services, such as, pathology or radiology within your organisation, to provide a service catalogue to your trust/network/region, so they can request diagnostic tests and/or procedures for their patients. This can extend outside your organisation so other healthcare service providers, such as primary care, can request electronically. ICE requesting features enable you to:

• Capture greater clinical information at the point of request
• Manage demand, avoiding unnecessary duplication of tests and patients being overexposed e.g. in the case of repeat radiological examinations
• Restrict requests of certain tests/exams to the appropriate personnel/departments
• Integrate with ‘downstream systems’, giving the requester a real-time status of their request
• Configure the workflow to assist end users e.g. include sets of tests that relate to specific clinical conditions

Reporting

ICE allows you to receive reports from downstream systems, such as Laboratory, Radiology, Cardiology and Endoscopy. These reports are displayed within the application and can be interacted with by users with the appropriate permissions. With ICE reporting, you can:

• Integrate with a wide array of third-party systems to receive reports and display these within the system e.g. LIMS, RIS, cardiology, endoscopy
• Use access permissions to control who can see which reports
• Hide sensitive information such as genitourinary medicine (GUM) reports
• View full audit trails for each report ensuring all interactions with that report are recorded
• Sign off results electronically with the ‘Results Acknowledgement’ feature, ensuring all results are viewed and acted upon
• Generate notifications (SMS and Email) based on an array of criteria, including, abnormal status, % increase or decrease, n fold increase or decrease
• Generate various report types including cumulative views and graphing

Sample Collection

ICE provides an in-built sample management solution enabling clinical users to utilise handheld devices for sample collection, reducing sample errors, enabling faster patient discharges and improved outcomes.

Sample collection is a critical step within the pre-analytical process and errors at this stage such as patient misidentification or mislabelling can cause significant issues. The resulting impact from errors made in sample collection include:

• Transfusion related morbidity and mortality
• Medication errors
• Misdiagnosis
• Delay in patient care
• Re-bleeding due to rejected samples

For more information about how our ICE Order Communications Software can improve your workflow, please get in touch.