Professional Record Standards Body (PRSB) is to lead a consultation for NHS England aiming to explore how an individual’s characteristics are used in clinical decision-making and improve how those characteristics are recorded in care records, with focus on ensuring that patient diversity is reflected.
The project will look to make care “safer, more inclusive and more effective” by supporting seamless and standardised data sharing across NHS systems, and looking to address “critical” gaps – here PRSB cites examples such as ethnicity data not capturing specific information required to inform diagnosis or assess medication efficacy, or manual workarounds being required for transgender patients to ensure that they are invited to sex-specific screening programmes.
Working in partnership with the Federation for Informatics Professionals alongside a stakeholder community including LGBTQ+ groups, healthcare professionals, patient representatives and system suppliers, PRSB is to develop a new approach for recording this data.
PRSB states that the approach will aim to tackle existing gaps, reduce risks by including more cohesive information, and ensure that “information such as sex and gender identity is accurately reflected without compromising safety or dignity.”.
Patient records in the news
In October, we reported plans from the Department of Health and Social Care around the creation of a “more modern” NHS in which patients have increased ownership over their own medical history; this includes intention for a single patient record which will bring patient health information, test results and letters together in one place through the NHS App.
Other news around the NHS App and patient records saw NHSE announce a new partnership with libraries across England, seeking to offer support to people using online health services and the app.
We also previously explored recommendations for research using electronic health records, published in a Frontiers study, highlighting “five key themes” for the challenges associated with conducting research with EHRs.
Digital healthcare and diversity
In September, we spoke with Kumbi Kariwo, equality and inclusion project lead at Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, to learn more about her research into wound care in darker skin tones and how this has translated into practice in Birmingham and beyond.
We reported how Health Innovation North East and North Cumbria and North East and North Cumbria ICB launched a programme to support early-stage investment into innovations designed to address the gender gap in women’s health.
And summer saw HIMSS deliver a series of recommendations on how to engage “diverse and underserved communities” in the design, development and validation of health IT tools and systems, including prioritising design thinking and scalable frameworks.
