Technology fund supports first stage of ‘Connecting Care’ in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire

The first stage of a programme to deliver a detailed, local shared patient record in parts of the South West of England has gone live and subsequently been rewarded with a successful application for NHS England’s Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards technology funding to support the second stage.

Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG) Health Community was recently named an exemplar Integrated Digital Care Record (IDCR) site by NHS England and will receive funding to support its aim of joining up silos of information across different organisations to improve care delivery.

BNSSG selected Orion Health’s Cross Community Care Record to deliver the Connecting Care programme and has now gone live with the first stage, focusing on urgent and unscheduled care.

By sharing health and social care information across the community, authorised users will be able to access meaningful, largely real-time information centred around the patient in a single view, allowing care to be provided in the most-appropriate setting and reducing the burden on emergency care units.

As part of the first stage, 500 care professionals across 13 diverse organisations are now able to obtain secure and user-based, appropriate online access to health and social care records including patient demographics, reports, referrals, scheduled appointments, discharge details and care assessments.

The focus on urgent care was selected to support closer inter-dependencies between GPs, minor injuries units, out of hours providers, community nursing, social care, ambulance trust and hospital emergency care. Furthermore, the urgent care requirements are an important focus of the national agenda, supporting the NHS’s Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention challenge to save £15-20billion by 2014.

Andy Kinnear, director of informatics and business intelligence at South West Commissioning Support, and the Connecting Care programme chairman, said: “This is an important first step in connecting care across our community and working towards a vision for better patient experience, quality of clinical care and efficiency of our services.

“Partnering with Orion Health, which has a strong track record of integrating care, has meant we have been able to join up many complex systems and organisations. We will now start to assess the benefits delivered before building a business case for stage two – a wider roll out across our community and clinicians.”

Colin Henderson, managing director for the UK and Ireland at Orion Health, added: “Given the scale of this programme covering many diverse organisations, we are very proud to be the selected IT partner to BNSSG ahead of 40 other suppliers.

“Our portal technology is now set up to pull information from 11 different systems allowing medical information to ‘follow’ the patient to any care setting throughout Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire, helping authorised users to make safer, faster more-informed decisions. ”