Up to 100 people attended last week’s Wessex Care Records Programme Awareness event in Bournemouth – the first of its kind for the pilot Local Health and Care Record Exemplar (LHCRE).
Tim Cotton, clinical lead for Hampshire and Isle of Wight Sustainability and Transformation Plan, told some interesting patient stories, highlighting how people don’t want to keep on reporting their story to different health professionals, or in the case of dementia patients, are unable to do so.
Presenting the national perspective, John Farenden, NHS England senior programme lead, said the network of LHCRE’s would integrate health and social are, enhance population health management, support research and empower people to get more engaged with their records.
Lisa Franklin, Senior Responsible Owner for the Wessex Care Records Programme, and clinical lead Mark Kelsey, talked about the progress of Hampshire’s Care and Health Information Exchange (CHIE) system. At present, 5,000 health and social care professionals are using the system every month, looking at around 58,000 unique patient records. Up to 90% of professionals are using the single-sign on system, which includes out of hours and emergency services in the county.
Rob Willington, consultant in geriatric medicine at Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals, said it was important for professionals to overcome the fear of change, adding that at present information was sometimes fragmented and could easily be missed: “Shared records have great potential to reduce harm and improve care,” he said, adding they would reduce duplication, and increase visibility of information in an acute setting.
Looking at the local authority perspective, Roger Carter, Hampshire County Council director of adults’ health and social care, said improved connectivity to staff working remotely was making a real difference and he looked forward to further communication engagement and enhance data matching as the Wessex Care Records programme developed.
David Rew, consultant surgeon at University Hospital Southampton, spoke about the UHS Lifelines service, which is based around a stack of synchronised timelines, on which documents, results and reports are plotted as interactive icons, according to their historic subject, date and time stamps (also known as metadata) on a dynamic two dimensional chart. The X axis displays time from left to right, and the vertical axis can display any number of data timelines for which a subject taxonomy exists.
This is a conceptually very simple but operationally radical approach to the real time visualisation and interrogation of a complex clinical record. It allows large quantities of clinical information to be displayed on a single computer screen. It allows users to harness the high speed powers of the visual brain to “read the story” in the mass of information held in the iconographic patterns, and to select and access key documents in seconds. It is now live for more than 5,000 users within its electronic patient record (EPR) and for 2.5m individual health records.
The session concluded with a question and answer session, with issues discussed including access to records and consent, linking the Dorset Care Record and CHIE, having a single IT provider for all care records, the need for community pharmacies to be involved in the care record system, the availability of real time data and how sharing data can save lives.