In our final think-piece of 2022, our Head of Service Andy Cowling looks back at some of the success stories of the past year and ahead to some of the interoperability plans to further enhance the Dorset Care Record
I can’t believe that it has been 12 months since I was asked to write the last one of these – time certainly flies in the world of the Dorset Care Record (DCR).
First off, let’s look at some of our key statistics for the year:
- We have increased our average daily uses from 2,000 to over 3,000 which shows a significant 50% improvement
- We have generated over £2.7m in non-cash releasing benefits for the Dorset system
- We have managed to surpass a major milestone in training over 5,000 health and social care professionals
- We have delivered nine pilots, involving real patients, for our patient portal myDCR.
These statistics will grab the headlines and myself and the team are rightly proud of them but they don’t tell the whole story – just the end results of all of the hard work that the PMO, Orion Health and our partners put into the programme every day.
New information
In terms of new things in the system this year we have had a number of additional document types arrive in the system – primarily from Dorset County Hospital and also we are nearly there with Adults’ alerts by Dorset Council. With the pressures on the health and social care services it has proven to be challenging to get other additional feeds into the record, but we have been working on bigger and better things for 2023.
2023
Our plans for 2023 include Additional Adults’ information from Dorset Council, Documents and other information from Dorset HealthCare, Pathology results from University Hospitals Dorset (UHD) – all of which show that we’ve another busy year ahead for myself and the team.
2023 should also deliver the first of several key initiatives to allow information from within DCR to be shared with health and social care professionals in Hampshire and vice versa which will really help with patient care for people who live on the border of the counties and often use different health and social care settings. Another major milestone for the DCR team together with our Hampshire colleague in CHIE and Wessex Care Records
Patient portal
As highlighted, the team have delivered nine pilots for the patient portal, myDCR. This led to nearly 200 people registering for myDCR. Over 130 had a least one letter published in their myDCR and in many cases five or more letters have been published per patient. This has given us a huge amount of insight into how a patient portal can benefit, as well as highlighting how much work there is still to be done to ensure the portal can achieve maximum benefits to our patients.
The main message from our pilots is that people want to see more of their patient – that has been heard loud and clear and we are ensuring our partners are hearing that message.
Outside of the programme
Outside of the programme DCR has taken the lead in several national things – we have set up and led a customer-led user group for us and other customers of Orion Health and we have run a number of shared learning webinars which have covered a wide range of topics. With both initiatives we are looking to encourage the sharing of experiences, knowledge and any lessons learned – after all there is no point making a mistake that someone else has already made!
Award nomination
Finally, I’d like to highlight that the team got highly commended in the Health Tech News Efficiency Savings of the Year award for their work on the benefits work which is showing that the DCR is helping the Dorset Health and Social Care system by over £2.7m, and by end of the 2022/3 financial year this is estimated to rise to more than £4m.
The majority of this has been through time savings, which means health and social care professionals can better spend their time looking after you – the patient. This type of information makes me hugely proud and it’s for exactly this reason the DCR exists!
Roll on 2023 and whatever challenges (and opportunities) it presents us – I’m really looking forward to it!
Ends