One click access to summary care record made easy
June 2009 - Having worked closely with NHS Connecting For Health to achieve spine compliance, the leading unscheduled care IT provider, Adastra, is delighted to report that their integrated solution is a big success with early adopter teams at BARDOC (Bury & Rochdale Doctors on Call) and NHS Bolton.
Dr Darren J Mansfeld, Clinical Lead for urgent care and patient safety at NHS Bolton said, “We chose to upgrade our Adastra system to the integrated version with spine functionality because accessing the Summary Care Record had been extremely clunky. Since the Adastra implementation the hassle factor has gone and our Summary Care Record hits have shot up from 200 per month to 200 per week.”
The Summary Care Record (SCR) is an electronic summary of key health information. It holds limited essential information derived initially from the patient's GP record and includes details regarding medication, adverse reactions and allergies. The Personal Demographic Service (PDS) provides the gateway to accessing SCRs – a central index that contains patient names, addresses, telephone numbers, registered practice and NHS number of all registered patients
in England.
Adastra has integrated the PDS look-up as part of the software’s case entry function allowing users to validate their patients' demographic details and obtain patients' NHS numbers. The NHS number triggers the system to offer authorised users access to their patients' SCR’s with the relevant smart card in place.
Fazal Aslam, IT & Business Development Manager at BARDOC said, “Our Call Handlers use the PDS search functionality to verify patient demographics data and retrieve the patient NHS Number. We have had positive feedback from Practice Managers in terms of improved data quality they receive from us and with the addition of the patient NHS Number being included they are finding it much easier to match the patient Out of Hours encounter report with their record held in
general practice.
This valuable Adastra functionality represents a significant step in the vision of the Next Stage Review set out by Lord Darzi to improve the quality of the patient experience through the provision of a coordinated approach between scheduled and unscheduled healthcare teams. Both BARDOC and NHS Bolton, who between them have created almost 200,000 SCRs for patients within their communities already, are leading the way with the use of Adastra spine functionality and are starting to reap the benefits.
Dr Mansfeld went on, “We now encourage our clinicians to access the SCR through Adastra as part of the consultation and it is fast becoming the norm. Even with the limited SCR information that is available currently clinicians can already see details of medication and allergies allowing them to make decisions that are much better informed.”
Adastra's solution includes an initial database cleansing exercise matching via NHS number and amalgamating duplicate records. It also handles the matter of ‘establishing that the clinician has a legitimate relationship with the patient’ and ‘patient consent’ – providing a full audit trail for the clinician’s records.
Dr Gillian Braunold, Clinical Director of the SCR and HealthSpace programme told us, “The work Adastra has done in terms of improving speed and ease of access to the SCR represents a gear change in SCR roll out across the country. No project on this scale could ever happen overnight, there is a learning curve for everyone involved. The SCR initiative is making good, solid progress with over 328,000 SCRs available and 16 PCTs actively involved in the roll out. The SCR has arrived and it is only a matter of time before it is available across the entire population.”
Jim Chase, Managing Director of Adastra Software Ltd said, “Adastra is extremely proud to be part of this project. This is very much in line with our strategy to listen to our customers and support them by staying at the forefront of technology for unscheduled and urgent care. It is also in line with our promise to our customers to collaborate with IT and content providers, to enable information sharing and contribute to the NHS’ drive to connect patient journeys.”
