West Berkshire PCTs and Torex Work on Multidisciplinary Record

Clinical teams in West Berkshire are to work with Torex Health to develop a next-generation community and primary care system which will offer online, integrated, multi-disciplinary records highlighting all aspects of a patient’s clinical care.

It was announced this week that Torex had been awarded “preferred bidder” status for the final contact which is expected to be agreed in the autumn and is planned to run for seven years.

After developing the West Berkshire system with Wokingham, Reading and Newbury and community PCTs, Torex Health expects it to have much wider appeal in NHS primary and community care.

Chief executive of Wokingham PCT, Sue Heatherington, said, “Although this is a patient-centred solution, it will also bring significant benefits to doctors, nurses and allied health professionals as it will bridge the gaps between professional groups, enabling all clinicians to work together more effectively, rather than in isolation. There are no systems at the moment that can meet this kind of clinical need, so we’ll be developing and testing the next generation of software for community and primary care.”

The new system will be developed for use by all healthcare professionals in the community including district nurses, health visitors, school nurses, dietitians, physiotherapists and speech and language therapists. It will also enable primary and community clinicians to link with clinical colleagues in hospitals.

Nutrition and dietetic services manager, Kathy Debenham, explained that under the current, largely paper-based system it was sometimes difficult to see who else was involved in the care of a patient.

”One needs one’s own records in an environment where that [information] is shared,” she said.

The main contact dietitians have with electronic records is in GP practices. It is possible to add notes to a record if the dietitian sees a patient at the practice, but if they are seen at home a letter has to be sent.

”We send a letter, but increasingly it’s difficult to know what happens to that if the practice is paperless,” said Ms Debenham. “If you think about the situation for dietitians who are going into several practices, they have to learn all those different systems. Even if the practices have the same system, they are configured differently, so they look different.”

The need for mobile access has been noted and training requirements are being built into the project from an early stage. “There’s a huge spectrum of skills from people who are very expert through to people who wouldn’t know how to switch the computer on,” said Ms Debenham.

In addition to developing the shared multi-disciplinary record, the team also hope to introduce care protocols within the system which will help other members of the team to decide when a referral to specialist help from another professional is needed.

For example, in dietetics, Ms Debenham explained, the aim would be to give online guidance on what could be done to treat a patient with raised blood lipids before referral and to show when a referral was needed.

Torex Health managing director, Steve Garrington, said, “We have been advocating and supporting a change in the delivery of patient records for many months and we see this project as firm evidence of real payback from the government’s continued investment in the NHS.”