Letters
Faxed electronic summaries are valued by general practitioners
EDITOR,--Jane Smith's synopsis of the Audit Commission's report Setting the Records Straight: A Study of Hospital Medical Records highlights several timely issues.1 2 For example, clinical contracts are settled on the basis of information derived from coded data generated without appreciable input from clinicians. This may lead to incorrect estimates of activity, with resulting contracts providing a poor reflection of clinical need. One approach to solving this problem is that adopted at Central Middlesex Hospital, where clinicians do the coding themselves.3 Another is to use the data collected by most hospital information systems (data on the general practitioner and demographic data on the patient together with diagnostic and procedural codes), validate the clinical activity codes at regular meetings with the coding staff, and download these data to a standard word processing package that contains a free text module. The resulting discharge summary is then sent to the family doctor.
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