Up to date shared care records, available at a touch of a button, can not only help GPs in their daily work but also save time and costs for practice staff.
Phil Koczan, clinical lead for shared records and primary care digital transformation at NHS England, said shared care records offered a lot of softer benefits for GPs.
Dr Koczan, who is also a GP in north London, regularly uses the OneLondon shared care record, and finds it useful as it provides an overarching view of a patient’s treatment.
Overarching View
“My colleague saw a patient one Friday morning and was concerned they might have fractured their shoulder so sent them for an x-ray. The result came back late Friday evening showing there was a fracture, but it wasn’t clear whether or not they had been sent to the Emergency Department for treatment.
“By going on to the shared care record I could see they had been admitted to Accident and Emergency and had had an MRI scan.
“This meant there was nothing more for me to do, so I didn’t have to make further calls to the patient and was able to leave the practice on time.”
Communication
Most shared care records are intuitive, meaning that not a large amount of time was needed for training, but he added practice managers had a large role to play in raising awareness among staff of the usefulness of shared care records and driving adoption.
Dr Koczan recognised there are challenges in getting GPs and staff to use shared care records, but these were often down to poor communication and a lack of emphasis of their softer benefits.
“Sometimes, shared care records place too much emphasis on the technical approach of the feeds that are being introduced rather than talking up the benefits. A drip feed approach of information is important as is the understanding that a lot of clinicians learn from other colleagues.”
He added that it was vital shared care records used data to see which clinicians were looking at what information, enabling them to understand who is accessing and who is not using the record, in order to encourage more adoption.
“There may be an underlying technical issue but it may be simply down to a lack of information on its availability.”
Data
Keeping data as simple as possible was vital, he stressed, adding there may be too much unstructured and unfiltered data which was often confusing: “What’s important is for me to be able to get to the right information at the right time… Above all, clinicians generally are not interested in the technical bits of how the records are made available, they want to know it is simple to use and safe. When I am looking for a specific piece of information, such as whether further tests had been requested for the patient with the fractured shoulder, I want to be able to search the shared patient record and find the information there and then rather than having to advise staff to chase information directly from the hospital.
“The best example of knowing whether your care record is a success is to see what happens if the system goes down for an hour and see how many people howl in protest,” he added.
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