369 practices across the North East are using the Medical Interoperability Gateway (MIG) to share 3.6 million patient records.
The Great North Care Record is a project led by GP practices, hospitals, community and mental health trusts. It aims to create an agreed Dataset of patient information which can be immediately accessed by a wide range of health and care professionals across the North East.
It was created 12 months ago as part of the £20 million Connected Health Cities project and has taken significant step forward with 96% of GPs practices agreeing to share their patient records with secondary care providers.
By using the MIG, secondary care providers will now be able to view the summary care record, alongside live medication, diagnoses, blood tests and other medical information.
Joe McDonald, Connected Heath Cities’ director and chief clinical information officer at Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust said;
“The big leap forward is 96% GP practices going, ‘OK we’ll turn that on’.”
Patients will have to have to opt-in using an explicit consent model and McDonald feels this approach will help to avoid potential pit falls;
“If we’re going to digitalise the NHS, we’re going to need to be able to set our privacy settings. And once people can set their privacy settings, the whole care.data issue goes away because you put the citizen in charge, and they can trust you because they’re setting who sees what.”
