Our Programme Director Astrid Fairclough was part of a Health Service Journal (HSJ) webinar earlier this autumn, that looked at the progress of shared care records and plans for their future
Run in association with Orion Health, Astrid joined a small panel of experts from Doncaster and Derbyshire to consider the progress that has already been made on shared care records and – importantly – where we might go from here.
Convenor Claire Read said what was quickly clear was that, regardless of starting point, there had been consistent advances on shared care records in recent months.
The Dorset Care Record was launched in March 2018 and Astrid Fairclough spoke of how the pandemic had brought about “astronomical increases in use”.
The panel saw another important possible means of evolution for shared care records, in the form of supporting population health management approaches.
“We are not using our shared record at the moment to support population health management but, for quite some time, we’ve been excited about the idea of doing that and how we might go about doing it,” said Katie Dowson, director of digital at Doncaster CCG and integrated care partnership. “We were talking about it prior to the pandemic, because we’ve got an opportunity here where we have got that rich dataset, that composite record,” HSJ reported.
The challenge, the panel suggested, will be working out how to employ such setups in this context. Shared care records typically draw data from a variety of systems rather than being the means through which data is stored or entered. That means careful thinking is required if they are to be used to contribute to population health management approaches.
“We’ve got population health management systems in both [our local] ICSs that are largely drawing their information direct from source, so they aren’t using the shared care record as their main populator,” explained Astrid, who is director of the Wessex Care Records and the Care and Health Information Exchange, which covers Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, as well as of the Dorset Care Record. “But can we use the shared care record as the surface for that [population health management] insight?”
Gary Birks, general manager UK and Ireland at Orion Health, explained that the typical aim of such systems has been to make data available in as close to real time as possible to clinicians. But population health management approaches may require something different.
“To make that step to mature shared care records so that they can be used more fully for population health management, we have to [have] the data in a form that allows analytical opportunity over a long period of time.”
Having worked on shared care record projects for many years, he was confident that such progressions are possible. “The pandemic has accelerated an evolution of the shared care record in very much the same way that the shared care records have naturally evolved over the years,” he said. While “everybody’s at a different point of the journey”, he said it was a journey that can and will continue.
- This article is taken from the HSJ piece written by convenor Claire Read.