Here is our usual end of year review by our Head of Service, Andy Cowling. He takes a look back at some of the highlights of 2024.
It’s December again so that means the regular annual update from me for the Dorset Care Record (DCR) – my 5th review! I can’t believe how quickly that has come around.
Continue reading “Dorset Care Record – Review of the Year 2024”
In our final think-piece of 2023, 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.
Well, here we are again, this is the 4th annual review that I’ve done for the Dorset Care Record (DCR) programme and – as usual – it doesn’t seem that long ago that I wrote last year’s!
Continue reading “Dorset Care Record – Review of the Year 2023”
On Saturday 12 August 2023 we implemented a new release of DCR.
Release 11 introduces a number of key features:
Infrastructure changes to allow social care – care packages to be added to the system:
The DCR now has the ability to accept care packages from both Mosaic systems at Dorset Council and Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council. We will be working with these partners over the coming months for them to start sending the information to the DCR.
Infrastructure changes to allow substance misuse information to be added to the system:
DCR now has the ability to accept demographics, referrals, and encounters from the Halo caseload management system, which is used by community drug and alcohol services across the county. We are working with Reach (Dorset) and With You (Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole) to deliver this information over the next few months.
New user role
We have added a new clerical admin role (for users that do not need access to clinical information) and we will be identifying users for this over the coming months.
Interoperability with CHIE
Infrastructure changes have been made to DCR in anticipation of sharing documents with Hampshire and Isle of Wight shared care record.
Social care tab
A new place in the record to show social care alerts, referrals and care packages in one place
This is an exciting period for us as we are expecting to have both University Hospitals Dorset’s pathology and Dorset Health Care’s mental health documents arriving shortly too.
Our next release will be Release 12 and we are aiming for it to be before Christmas 2023. Watch this space!
Our latest release is now underway and on schedule to arrive in mid-August. This latest release will including the functionality for:
There will be some other minor system enhancements also being delivered with this release.
We have seen, again, that our usage has topped 100,000 patient views for May. We have also, for the first time, had over 3,000 distinct active users which is fantastic and shows that Dorset Care Record continues to deliver value wherever it is used.
We have recently reported our benefits statistics for the last financial year and we are reporting that we have generated nearly £5m in efficiency savings this has been generated in terms of time savings and also covers the significant decrease in phone calls needed to primary care as DCR holds the answers. This financial year we are hoping to report somewhere near £8m non-cash releasing benefit as usage of DCR continues to grow.
DCR users have commented that they have quicker access to data and that patients no longer have to repeat their story because the health and social care services are sharing information.
Other results from the survey highlighted that 9/10 users said the care they give to patients is improved by using the DCR and almost half said they thought there may be a risk to patient harm if the DCR is not used. The Dorset Council alerts were fed into the DCR in 2022 and 4/5 people reported how useful these are and the same number of users said they would like to see health and social care information from beyond the Dorset border in the DCR.
We have an exciting summer ahead of us with the following due for delivery from our partners: