Health and social care providers across Berkshire are sharing health and care information electronically on up to 850,000 residents in one of the country’s largest shared care record projects.
The first major phase of Berkshire’s shared care record initiative has gone live. Known as Connected Care, the new clinical system links key health and care information about Berkshire residents for professionals involved in their care. The system enables the sharing of resident information across two different Sustainability and Transformation Planning footprints, covering 98 GP practices, the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust (an acute hospital in Reading), Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (a community and mental health trust), two local authorities and the out of hours General Practice services.
The integrated record sharing solution is built on Graphnet’s CareCentric shared record software. Phase one of Connected Care involves 18 health and social care partner organisations and up to 12,000 health and care professionals who, with the individual’s
permission, can access essential information about the person to enable the right care at the right time from many different service providers.
The remaining NHS trusts and councils are being brought onto the system within the next few months as part of a phased rollout. This will include Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust, South Central Ambulance Service and five other local authorities.
Nigel Foster, Finance Director for Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust and East Berkshire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and the Programme Board lead for the Connected Care NHS South, Central and West Commissioning Support Unit project in Berkshire East, said: “The vision behind this project is all about helping us make speedy, informed decisions, deliver more co-ordinated services and harness the latest available technology to improve clinical effectiveness, so that patient care is seamless.”
As well as combining information held in different IT systems, the shared record will allow innovative future developments, such as the creation of individualised care plans, creating co-ordinated multi-agency care for individual patients and enabling new ways of delivering services. Patients will only need to tell their story once and healthcare professionals will be able to work together, with access to all the key information about a person, to give timely and seamlessly coordinated care.
