Digital Health and Care Wales has shared an update on an electronic record specifically for diabetes patients, which has been used in the creation of more than 150,000 diabetes consultation notes (DCNs) since its launch in 2019.
The note provides diabetes care information via the Welsh Clinical Portal, in which Digital Health and Care Wales said “improves quality and safety of care by reducing the duplications of tests, treatment and appointments, and allows quicker access to data for all health care professionals”.
Greeshma Sibi, lead diabetes specialist nurse at Morriston Hospital, says that the solution “ensures that everyone involved in a patient care journey has access to the necessary information, facilitating coordinated and collaborative decision making”.
The DCN forms part of the Welsh Information Solution for Diabetes Management (WISDM) alongside the Diabetes View, a single read-only summary of key diabetes and test information. As of this month, DCNs have been viewed more than 270,000 times by a variety of clinical, specialist and administrative staff, including health boards.
Emma Barker, diabetes service lead dietitian for Hywel Dda University Health Board, comments: “WISDM for us as a team has been amazingly beneficial so we can see current, up to date information from the other diabetes multi-disciplinary teams, this helps aid us within our assessments ensuring we are all working together to ensure best patient care.”
Plans for the future include the potential for installing a “paediatric review tab”, which will provide a patients’ full diabetes record throughout their lifetime. It is hoped that a paediatric version of the platform will be used as a database for National Paediatric Diabetes Audit.
In addition, work is underway to ensure that data from the DCN can be fed back to the health boards via a data extract and statistics dashboard, which will give health boards the ability to monitor and improve patient outcomes and support national diabetes audits, research and trials.
We recently covered how the Data Alliance Partnership Board has approved a new diabetes record information standard, recommended by The Professional Record Standards Body (PRSB), with PRSB CEO Loraine Foley stating that the standard will “improve the care and management of people living with diabetes”.
