Many of the challenges facing the NHS are writ large in Lincolnshire. The second largest county in England, over half of its population live in rural locations and, with one in ten residents over the age of 70, it has a disproportionately large elderly population. Alongside this, it is having to work harder than ever to make every penny count.
To meet these challenges, in 2013 Lincolnshire’s healthcare partner organisations undertook a major review aimed at transforming its health and social care services and exploring how it could work more effectively with the third sector. Its goal was also to move healthcare out of hospitals, to situate it closer to patients’ homes wherever possible.
In an ideal world the answer would have been to create a brand new, single, overarching patient information system available to all health and care professionals, including its acute trust, its community hospital, its mental health trust, ambulance trust, 85 GP practices, social and community care services. However, cost, time and continuity of care makes this option prohibitive.
Instead Lincolnshire’s healthcare leaders looked at how to bring together the myriad existing systems into a unified patient record, now live and called Care Portal. This meant having to focus on overcoming an increasingly significant challenge facing the health service – interoperability.
– Feature by InterSystems
