Orion Health’s Senior Project Manager Doug Robertson looks at how myDCR will become the firm’s first patient portal in England and highlights some of the benefits arising.
Enabling patient engagement is a key priority for Orion Health. While we work with 60+ shared care records globally, relatively few of these have embarked on digital patient engagement programmes.
It has been a privilege to work with the team at My Dorset Care Record (myDCR), particularly given that it is the first implementation of our patient portal technology in England. myDCR expects to deliver wide-ranging benefits to both patients and health care staff.
For example, unpaid carers will be able to better support those they look after as patients will be able to grant access to their information to friends and family. Specialists will be able to better monitor patients by asking them to submit photos and progress against goals and actions and patients will be able to clearly see their appointments.
A collaborative approach
Orion Health’s Engage Patient Portal solution is well established and implemented around the world. In Northern Ireland for example, the Northern Ireland Electronic Care Record has had a patient portal in place since 2019, used by cohorts of patients living with dementia and diabetes.
When working on the myDCR project, Orion Health and the myDCR team collaborated to ensure that the product was implemented to maximise patient benefits. The myDCR team provided invaluable feedback on the design and worked closely with our development teams both in the UK and New Zealand. Some of this work will now benefit our own customers globally who go on to implement our portal and will help to inform Orion Health’s product development roadmaps going forward.
Collaborative working was key to the overall success of the myDCR implementation. We had calls between the Orion Health and myDCR project teams three times per week to track progress, share problems, seek solutions together as one team and keep things on track. When we hit roadblocks, such as a requirement to revisit the security model, we worked through these collectively, learning lessons along the way and building strong relationships between the project teams on both sides.
Now live, the myDCR patient portal is hosted in the cloud through RedCentric and accessible to patients wherever they are in the country. It currently offers documents, shared files, photos, shared goals and actions and clinical correspondence. myDCR is being piloted over the next few months by a range of patients, before wider rollout throughout Dorset.
Looking ahead
We look forward to supporting both the Dorset Care Record (DCR) and myDCR going forward, including with some valuable core DCR upgrades and maintenance in the near term and developments to the diabetes pathway later in the year. We are really excited to see the feedback from the myDCR pilot patients, and for this important tool for patient engagement and empowerment to be rolled out further.
Global interest
There is a growing interest in our patient portals around the world. In Northern Ireland, their My Care Record patient portal is soon to benefit from an upgrade and a series of functional enhancements. In Canada, the landscape for patient engagement technologies is very busy. Quebec is currently rolling out the remote patient monitoring tool that has been in place for several years to support further patient cohorts, including oncology. Newfoundland is embarking on a new patient portal programme. We are also soon to launch a digital front door solution for a further Canadian province, to transform how citizens in the region interact with healthcare and expect other provinces to follow.
In New Zealand, Southern Cross, the country’s largest private healthcare organisation, has added forms capability to their Engage Patient Portal and is delivering surgical admission forms online before patients come in for surgery. It also has a patient health questionnaire in place allowing patients to complete details of their medications. These are then pulled through into an admission medical reconciliation form used by the clinicians, delivering an improved workflow between patients and their care provider. This explosion of interest in placing patients firmly at the centre of their own care is happening here in the UK too, where we anticipate more regions following in the inspirational footsteps of myDCR over the coming year.
- Orion Health offers solutions for patient portals, virtual care and digital front doors, in support of its vision to revolutionise healthcare so that every individual receives the perfect care for them.
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