In our final thought piece of the year, our Programme Manager Andy Cowling highlights the progress made by partners across the Dorset Care Record over the past 12 months and looks at some of the exciting initiatives ahead.
It has been a really exciting and productive year for the Dorset Care Record programme with our component number rising to 47 and a number of major releases completed successfully through 2020. We have seen meaningful contributions from all our partners and one partner completing all their deliverables. We have also introduced single sign on functionality for many of our users, resulting in a huge increase in people using the system.
What has been especially pleasing to see is that the partners, Orion Health and the DCR project management office have been able to form strong and effective working relationships that has meant communication is better than ever and it really feels like a team.
Information added over the past year has included community physical data, demographics and encounters from Dorset HealthCare (DHC); allergies, clinic letters, emergency discharge and inpatient discharge feeds from University Hospitals Dorset (UHD); cardiology and endoscopy reports from Dorset County Hospital (DCH) ; demographic information and single sign on from our two local authorities as well as social care referrals from Dorset Council.
As I’ve already highlighted, we have seen partnership working come to the fore and we have welcomed a very close working relationship with the Wessex Care programme (part of the NHS’s LHCR programme (Local Health and Care Record) which has enabled us to put in the early work that should lead to some ground-breaking results in 2021. One of Wessex’s key deliverables is to allow health and care providers to support people wherever they live across the region.
We have also welcomed closer partnership working with both Yeovil hospital as part of the COVID-19 response but also a number of our community pharmacy colleagues to ensure better, more joined up health and social care.
This year has also seen some significant changes for the DCR project management office with the establishment of an operational support team that, in conjunction with Orion Health, manage the system on a day to day basis and ensure that we have maintained over 99% of system uptime throughout the year – a fantastic achievement.
2020 has been a record breaking year for the DCR programme with month on month increases in:
- Patient records accessed moving from 4k to 18k a month – 450% increase
- Pathology and radiology reports accessed – rising per month from 349 to 3,500
- Number of log-ins by health and social care professionals – jumping from 2,000 to 12,000
- Users trained – doubling to more than 2,000 over the year
- The number of social media followers – rising from 1,500 to 2,000 over the last 12 months
It has been a fantastic year for the programme and 2021 promises to be even more exciting with the launch of a number of key initiatives:
- My Dorset Care Record – our patient portal that will initially enable you to create a “circle of care” for your family and carers support network and the electronic delivery of clinic letters from one of our hospitals. We have an ambitious set of targets for our patient portal in 2021 so watch this space!
- A pan-Dorset Diabetes clinical pathway – for the first time the diabetes teams at both of our hospitals will be using one system hosted within the Dorset Care Record.
We are also working on other plans for 2021 which should include ensuring that more mental health, social care data is included in our system as well as providing interoperability between us and Hampshire’s shared record – Care and Health Information Exchange (CHIE)the Hampshire shared care record (CHIE).
As you can see we have managed to deliver a huge amount in 2020 and I want to say thank you to both the PMO team and also all of our partners who have managed to deliver despite having to contend with the COVID pandemic and the challenges that has brought. I’m personally looking forward to seeing what we can achieve in 2021 and I hope you all join us on that journey for what should prove another record breaking year for the Dorset Care Record.
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