Hillingdon trust connects to Coordinate My Care urgent care plan system

Published: 18-Jan-2016

Hillingdon develops automated lookup to CMC system to ensure patients’ personally-approved urgent care plans are fulfilled


InterSystems has announced that on 14 December, Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust successfully connected to the Coordinate My Care (CMC).

CMC is a clinical service providing digital, personalised urgent care plans. Hillingdon care providers are now automatically alerted at the point of care via the trust’s mobile digital care record, if a patient has a CMC urgent care plan in place, and can treat accordingly.

CMC manages over 25,000 individual care plans for patients receiving urgent and palliative care in the greater London area. The CMC service, which is hosted by The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and built on the InterSystems HealthShare health informatics and interoperability platform, ensures that patients’ personally-approved care plans are shared with general practitioners (GPs), community nurses, community palliative care teams, hospitals, hospices, social workers, London Ambulance Service, NHS 111 and care homes. CMC’s aim is to ensure that all the healthcare professional teams involved in a patient’s care are connected 24/7.

“Before creating the auto lookup to CMC, we relied on cross checks between patients visiting the hospital and patients registered with a CMC urgent care plan. These plans were traditionally emailed to the trust and manually uploaded to the patient administration system (PAS). With our clinicians increasingly using mobile devices at the patients’ bedsides, we developed a mobile application to access the digital care record. We included an automatic lookup to CMC, which creates an alert in the patient record showing if a patient has an urgent care plan,” said Matthew Kybert, systems development and integration manager, Hillingdon Hospitals Foundation Trust.

Development time for the new auto lookup was minimised since both CMC and the trust already use InterSystems technology, enabling the trust to go live within just a few weeks. J2 Interactive, a healthcare technology consultancy and an InterSystems partner since 2003, supported the rapid implementation.

"The technical teams at InterSystems and J2 Interactive were extremely supportive, enabling us to Integrate with the CMC web service in four weeks from test to live deployment," said Pretesh Kotecha, senior systems integration specialist at the trust.

CMC is the first external source to be included in the mobile digital care record, and it will now ensure that clinicians have more-complete patient information in real time, in any care setting. If a CMC care plan is in place, an alert appears on the patient banner giving the clinician access to the plan, thereby ensuring patients’ care plan goals are met.

‘’The Hillingdon Care Record has revolutionised our assessment of patients, allowing us to access relevant information relating to our patients, all from one platform. It's proved most useful when assessing new patients that have come into hospital, allowing us to get a full picture of a patient's medical history,” said Dr Suraj Dabhi, FY1 HO at Hillingdon.

“With trusts such as Hillingdon already making use of the newer, faster, more-intuitive CMC urgent care plan system, uptake should rise across the capital and beyond,” said Mark Palmer, country manager at InterSystems.

“The integrated patient record alert system at Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is one of the first examples of how care providers will benefit from the new system in practice. To make sure progress continues, we will continue to work with CMC and other trusts to ensure connectivity with more GPs, community services, and acute and urgent care IT systems. This culminates in the delivery of full interoperability, allowing users to seamlessly use the CMC service from within their host systems where appropriate, wherever they are.”

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