The Care Information Exchange across North West London now hosts the health records of up to 2.3 million people.
Powered by Patients Know Best and funded by £3 million investment from Imperial Health Charity, CIE collects data from hospitals and GP practices in the area, and 15 other hospitals outside of North West London including Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Scotland and Wales. By using an Application Programming Interface (API) to display data in local medical systems, it enables hospital clinicians to see data about their patients who may also have been treated elsewhere in the country.
The company has recently introduced mass registration so people can sign up to access their health record either by speaking to a member of staff; by using the kiosk check-in screen commonly found in waiting rooms during their outpatient appointment; or by letter of invitation to their home.
The approach is proving to be a success at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust where kiosk registration has signed up over 3,000 patients in the first month alone with more than 70 people completing registration every day. As the process is automated, it means no staff time is taken up to verify the identity of patients.
Kevin Jarrold, Chief Information Officer at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Chelsea & Westminster NHS Foundation Trust, added: “We designed CIE so the data follows the patient wherever they are in the world. Our clinicians look after NHS patients from all over the UK in their national centres of excellence and with patients from London changing residence much more than the rest of the UK, it was important for us to choose a patient portal that allows patients to share data with any provider, and with open read-write APIs to integrate with their systems.”
Andy Kinnear, Chief Information Officer from Connecting Care – a similar program developed in Bristol, is particularly supportive of this model as it allows patients who travel between Bristol and North West London for tertiary care to easily share their data. He said: “It’s great that all data is truly available to the NHS via open APIs. But more than that, there is a consent layer that allows patients to express their preference on being contacted, taking part in research and sharing with friends and family that actually care for them. We have already had professionals in Bristol access data from London, and vice-versa.”
So far, more than 10,000 patients have registered with CIE and 31% have consented to share data for research purposes.
