A partner in the Deceased’s general practice gave evidence to the Inquest that the practice uses the EMIS system, and that, unlike SystmOne, the system does not have a scheduled task feature which would allow the GP to create an alert on a patient’s record to flag up when a task is due at a future date – eg an alert to book a follow up scan in one year. I have been informed that EMIS does allow a future entry into a patient’s record (a diary date), but this must be for a specific clinical code and the only way to see that there is a due diary date entry is to access the patient’s record and view the summary page or diary section. Unless the GP has reason to inspect the patient’s clinical record and examine the summary or diary pages there is no way of being alerted that a new task needs to be completed for that patient. Further, it is not possible to add a pop-up-linked diary date entry for a specific task (such as a scan) outside the EMIS determined list. This creates a situation where the responsibility for ensuring that follow up investigations are undertaken at the correct time is placed onto the patient, and the patient will have to contact the GP to request follow-up. In this case the Deceased was diligent in contacting his GP surgery to request repeat scans, but I consider that unless some action is taken there is a continuing risk of patients not contacting the GP to make a request for follow-up and therefore becoming lost to necessary follow-up.