Transcript
GARY BIRKS
Undoubtedly, technology is key to the success of delivering integrated care. As patients need to move more across the health care boundaries from organisation to organisation, it's key that data can follow them, that the patient record can follow them, both to deliver on increased efficiencies that integrated care will bring, but also to deliver benefits around patient safety and clinical care.
Traditionally, sharing data across health and social care has been constrained both through organisational silos, but also by the silos of technology and data across those health care organisations. For example, sharing data within acute care has typically been successful, but beyond the boundaries of thought, it's actually been quite limited. And now through the needs of an ageing population, it's important that care and the data can move beyond the acute setting.
One way that organisations can better share data within a local care economy is through the development and introduction of an integrated digital care record. An integrated digital care record brings together the patient's data from many different sources from many different care settings to give the clinician the right data at the right time. That means the clinician can make the best decision for the patient and also help deliver the greatest efficiencies for the health economy.
There are some great examples in the NHS of the use of integrated digital care records. In Northern Ireland, for example, the health and social care boards have come together to develop an electronic care record. In Bristol, with the Connecting Care programme, which has brought together some 14 or so health and social care organisations to create a shared care record.
A more recent example is in the west of Scotland, where five health boards who have their own integrated digital care record held within clinical portals are now undertaking a programme of work that allows them to share and give access to each other's clinical portals. One of the benefits of the west of Scotland portal is actually with regards to the efficiency of clinicians finding patient data, and research ahead of the project showed that clinicians spent on average 70 minutes a day looking for patient data across health borders, and it was anticipated a reduction in the time to search for a patient record would create savings of around 20,000 pound per year per clinician.
Beyond the benefits of efficiency, organisations will find that through the use of an integrated digital care record, they'll actually begin to collate more and more data for each of their patients. That data will allow them to be less reactive, to be more proactive, and move along the journey towards population health management.
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The first thing that health care leaders need to do in developing an integrated digital care record is actually to engage all the stakeholders, including their patients, bringing your key stakeholders together to agree on the reasons and the importance of creating an integrated digital care record.