Advanced secures £1.3m contract with UK’s first mental health service for 0-25 year-olds

Forward Thinking Birmingham, the first mental health service for 0-25 year-olds in the country, has gone live using Carenotes from Advanced as its electronic patient record solution.

Carenotes will enhance communication and access to information across the organisation, ensuring a smooth pathway of care for patients.

The contract is worth approximately £1.3m over five years and the solution was implemented within a month of the contract being signed, in time for the launch of the new service at the start of April. The second stage of the project will see the Carenotes Mobile app and patient portal added.

Forward Thinking Birmingham is a partnership between five mental health providers, led by Birmingham Children’s Hospital, aimed at closing the gap between children and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) and adult mental health services. The partnership involves a mix of NHS providers, private sector providers, and charities, and will be supporting around 15,000 children and young adults every year.

As the service runs across six locations, it needed a user-friendly electronic patient record solution to aid decision-making between the different providers and provide staff with central access to information.

Advanced was selected through the London Procurement Partnership over four other suppliers due to its ease of use, cost-effectiveness and mobile functionality. The software is being hosted on the N3 NHS cloud network.

Adam Carson, associate director of IT at Birmingham Children’s Hospital, said: “Carenotes has become our central port of call for all clinical information and is critical to the aims of the programme. It allows us to manage the pathway of care for 0-25 year-olds in a way that was not possible before, ensuring smooth transfers of information and services between the different stages of a patient’s care.”

Two of the organisations involved in the programme – Worcestershire Health and Care NHS Trust and Priory Group – previously used Carenotes, but the system is now acting as the central information point across all five providers. Around 350 staff in a variety of clinical roles are using the system for recording appointments, clinical notes and assessments.

Carenotes provides Forward Thinking Birmingham’s staff with fast and easy access to information wherever and whenever they need it, meaning they are no longer carrying around paper records and writing notes by hand. This is saving the organisation time and paper, and will also generate significant cost savings in the future.

Forward Thinking Birmingham is due to go live with Carenotes Mobile shortly. The app will reduce travelling time and generate further efficiencies. Later in the year it will also implement Carenotes’ patient portal which will enable patients to access their medical records themselves.

Carson said: “We are a new service involving different staff from different providers, so we needed an electronic system that was easy to use and could be implemented quickly. Carenotes really supports the way we work collaboratively and we also liked the mobile application and the patient portal that Carenotes offers natively, as these are two features that will be hugely beneficial for us.

“Carenotes Mobile is going to make it even easier for staff to access information on the go, meaning they spend less time on administration and more time with patients, while giving our patients access to their records is something that is cutting-edge within the NHS.

"Our service is sure to grow in the coming years and Carenotes will support that growth and help us to operate as efficiently as possible and focus resources on our patients.”