Four NHS boards in the North of Scotland have now gone live with a new health and care portal from Orion.
NHS Grampian, NHS Highland, NHS Orkney, and NHS Shetland staff now have a single view of patient information held in different IT systems across the boards.
The portal covers some of the most remote areas in Scotland and has gone live following a launch event today and has started to sign-up clinical users.
The event showcases how the NoS Care Portal will make it easier for care professionals to access patient details, tests, scans and documents, and to share information with colleagues across the region.
Jim Docherty, NHS Highland clinical lead for eHealth, said: “This is all about giving clinicians quick and easy access to information. The NoS Care Portal takes information from many different systems and displays it all in one place and in context. It will save clinicians a lot of time and should make it much easier to care for patients who need to travel between NHS boards for treatment.”
In the north of Scotland, this means information currently held in the two patient management systems used by the four NHS boards and the three Scottish Care Information Stores in the region, which hold demographic data, lab results and clinical documents is made available. Staff will also be able to access images from picture archiving and communications systems and the national Emergency Care Summary.
Iain Ross, NHS Highland head of eHealth, said: “The NoS Care Portal went live on 18 December, but we didn’t want an all-singing, all-dancing launch over the busy Christmas period. Nevertheless, we delivered what we said we would deliver, which is a portal that integrates different IT systems, so a user can access one patient record across four NHS board areas.”
“Today’s launch is about making sure that clinicians have heard about the portal, and how it can help them to deliver joined-up care. By linking systems across secondary, primary and community care for the first time, our clinicians will have a more complete picture of the patient, so they can make more informed decisions.”
“We have many more plans: but it is investment in the regional portal that has got us to this stage, and that will enable us to deliver them.”
The next part of the NoS Care Portal programme will make (with appropriate agreements) GP and social care data viewable alongside the acute patient information, while further developments may include the roll-out of Orion Health functionality to manage patient pathways and let clinicians set up collaborative worklists to support team working across the region.
