Change Grow Live, a drug treatment charity in Northamptonshire, now has access to the Northamptonshire Care Record, with Northamptonshire ICB reporting that the connection is already “making a difference to the speed of service” provided for local people.
Verona Govender, a specialty substance misuse doctor, highlighted that “timely prescribing not only enhances safety but also addresses significant health inequalities faced by this marginalised group. Access to up-to-date medical information enables clinicians to prescribe safely and confidently, particularly when patients are not engaged with other healthcare services.”
Northamptonshire ICB points to benefits including streamlining decision-making and lessening the administrative burden on GPs, who are often required to provide this information.
Kirstie Watson, director of digital, shared her team’s “delight” at seeing the difference that expanding the shared care record is making, noting: “Expanding our shared care record to include voluntary sector organisations is the next step in our digital development. We have an expert team who provide training and ensure that patient data is used appropriately and safely.”
Information for patients about the data shared, data security, and patient choice, is available from the ICBs dedicated webpage. This shares that the shared records will continue to develop to include data from local organisations such as social care providers and the voluntary and community sector. It also offers details on how patients can check who has accessed their record, and options to opt out.
Shared care records across the health and care sector
Cambridge University Hospitals has gone live to provide teams with “instant access” to their region shared care record directly from the trust’s Epic EPR. In what Cambridgeshire and Peterborough ICS is noting as “a major milestone” in the roll-out of the shared care record, access is granted through a role-based access control model, which makes information available based on job role and Epic login details. It means within the Epic EPR, staff can click a ‘Shared Care’ button to access the record.
Suffolk and North East Essex ICB, has shared an update on digital progress as part of the board’s latest meeting in March, highlighting work underway and benefits realisation on shared care records, future systems, digitising social care, EPR, and more. Priorities that the system is working toward span an ICS-wide cyber strategy and system response procedure, having a single EPaCCS system, enabling a unified approach to digital care, ensuring all care providers have a digital social care record and connection to the social care integration platform to enable interoperability with the shared care record.
Interweave has announced that GPRCC (General Practice Repository for Clinical Care) and eHealthscope data has gone live in the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire shared care record, taking them one step closer to completing the first phase of data development. The introduction of the GPRCC and eHealthscope data is said to combine “crucial insights” with wider community services, including community nursing, community mental health services and Nottinghamshire County Council social care services. It means these services can now access end of life coded data and 10 million conditions/diagnoses from EMIS and SystmOne, frailty data around mobility, continence, living arrangements etc. and diabetes coded data such as lab results and clinical findings, for people on the Diabetes Register.
