The theme of the Orion Health customer conference in Bristol earlier this month was on building on the shared care records to make healthcare more efficient for organisations and clinicians, to coordinate care for patients and to move towards population health management approaches. Our Communications lead Tony McDougal reports.
Covid-19 has accelerated changes and the digitalisation of healthcare with a strong focus on data to improve the health and care experience for both clinicians and patients.
Newly appointed Orion Health Chief Executive Officer Brad Porter said around the world, countries were releasing data strategies that focus on the need to make healthcare more equitable and accessible to those who it need it most.
Porter said it was important for the global healthcare sector to meet the demands of generation y – who have grown up with digital and use if for everything from shopping to banking and see no reason for healthcare to be different: “We need to ensure the right patient gets the right care in the right place at the right time. We need to have proactive, targeted, personalised interventions,” he added.
Connecting Care – Bristol
The conference heard about progress from several neighbouring shared care records – Connecting Care in Bristol and Hampshire’s Care and Health Information Exchange. Tracey O’Brien, digital consultant at NHS South Central and West and core member of the Connecting Care delivery team, spoke of the 10-year journey, which has seen 20 IT systems contributing to its share care record with 28 partners, 8,000 users and nearly 100,000 records being accessed per month.
O’Brien spoke of Connecting Care’s work with its 3 local authorities in both adults and children’s departments, 2 hospitals, mental and community health trust and special services, including care homes, domiciliary care providers substance misuse and triage and hospices.
Population health records have been shared for the past 4 years with University Hospital Southampton (UHS) and Patient Knows Best (PKB). But despite a decade or real progress, she acknowledged there was still much work to do: “There is plenty more to come on our roadmap – dentistry, prisons, extracting 111 information, frailty and long-term condition plans.”
O’Brien spoke about the progress of its care homes project, which received funding from the former NHS Digital: “There are more than 350 care homes in region. We have set up a VPN to allow them to access the Connecting Care network – they have to meet Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DPST) standards – and we have also been working with the Public Standards Record Board (PSRB) on standards.”
Her presentation was warmly welcomed by our Senior Reporting Officer Peter Gill, who thanked O’Brien for her past support for the DCR, when it was struggling to gain the support of health and social care practitioners with just 2,000 records being accessed a month. Last month the DCR was closing in on Bristol’s figure with more than 81,000 records accessed: “Connecting Care’s journey has been inspirational,” said Gill.
CHIE – Hampshire
The care home theme was reinforced by Katharine Guthrie, CHIE stakeholder engagement and benefits manager, who has been working with Orion Health to implement multi-factor authentication to make sure only authorised users are looking at patient information. To support the roll out in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight’s care homes, Guthrie said she had been looking at the information that care homes were keen to see.
“As you would expect, they are looking at medications and discharge information, so if Mrs Smith is heading towards them in an ambulance they can go onto CHIE to find out all about her,” she added.
API
Nicole Allan, global solutions director Orion Health, spoke about developments in the role of applications programming interfaces, or APIs, highlighting those that use international standards such as FHIR, to make sure that data is shared safely and consistently.
The DCR and CHIE are looking to exchange interoperability data within the Wessex Care Records and are expecting delivery of document sharing in 2023. The new Orion Health framework will make sure that both have full access to authentication information.
Engage
Anne O’Hanlon, Orion Health product director, spoke about the improvements being planned to its public facing Engage portal, which will see people being able to self-register rather than being invited to join by a clinician.
Feedback from our myDCR patient portal has included comments about being able to self-register and we are looking forward to working with Anne and her team to ensure people in Dorset will be able to join the platform easily.
Orion is also working with NHS England to ensure that its Engage product will be able to link to the NHS log-in, which has grown in popularity in the past two years with people signing up to ensure that their Covid vaccine records are up to date.
Other updates around the content management systems include patients being able to see invites that are pending or have expired and also a clear record of which health and social care professional has looked at both clinical and patient portals. An enhanced modern user interface welcome page, more and clearer content information, along with additional new forms compatibility are also on the horizon. A mobile first design for accessibility is also being driven forward with the help of stakeholders.
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