EMIS seeks 100 pilot practices for patient record access

A patient record access group is looking for 100 EMIS practices to take part in a pioneering project allowing patients to view their medical records over the internet.

The Record Access Collaborative, run by South-east London GP Dr Brian Fisher and funded by EMIS, has been testing patient record access in an informal project involving about 20 practices.

Now the collaborative, a group of practices, health professionals and patients dedicated to increasing patient access to records, wants to set up a formal pilot.

Dr Fisher said: “The Record Access Collaborative is seeking 100 practices to take part in a demonstration which will help us to develop the EMIS system so it delivers the maximum benefits for patients, GPs and practice staff. It’s a unique opportunity to take part in a ground-breaking project.”

The initiative has been warmly welcomed by Ewan Davis, chair of the British Computer Society’s Primary Health Care Specialist Group, who said EMIS were working ahead of Connecting for Health, which has promised access to summary information through its online presence HealthSpace but has yet to deliver.

He added: “You could say it’s partly to the credit of EMIS and the discredit of CfH. However of course it’s much easier for somebody to do this on a small scale as a private enterprise than at a national level where CfH have got to get all sorts of sign off.”

Davis welcomed what he described as EMIS’ cautious approach to patient record access which is seeing the company expand its initial handful of sites to the 100 practice project now planned.

To be eligible practices must be using EMIS’s PCS or LV systems and have the EMIS Access system installed. EMIS Access is used by a large number of practices to deliver online appointment booking and repeat prescription ordering although only a handful currently using the facility for patient record access. The scheme is jointly run with the company PAERS (Patient Access to electronic Record Systems) of which Dr Fisher is a director and which allowes patients to view their medical records via touchscreens in kiosks in GP surgeries before developing the online record viewer with EMIS.

The collaborative says that under the EMIS Access system, patients can view their record over the internet using “authenticated access” strictly controlled by individual passwords and PINs. An additional security level, a “one-time use authentication token”, has also been developed and will be available for practices to use in the pilot.

Unlike the limited information that will be available to practices via HealthSpace the Record Access Collaborative initiative will enable patients to view a summary of their most recent entries plus details of consultations, diagnoses, investigations and procedures, results, vaccinations, medications and letters.

The collaborative said EMIS also plans to develop its patient record access system so that patients reading their record can also be reminded to attend key appointments such as blood pressure or medication reviews.

Dr Fisher said: “Ultimately this will deliver huge benefits to those in the medical profession and to patients. All the evidence suggests it has the potential to improve the doctor-patient relationship, provide reassurance, reduce the risk of error, and improve self-care and compliance.

“It encourages better communication between clinician and patient and increases patient satisfaction. From our initial testing of the idea we’ve found that patients feel they understand 70 per cent of what they read.”

Advice and information is available to practices that are interested in taking part, including an outline of some of the issues involved and guidance on how to manage and administer access.

Dr Fisher said the Record Access Collaborative had already identified a number of potential safety or confidentiality issues such as records containing a third party reference or a piece of bad news that had not yet been broken to the patient, although he said there were simple precautions that could be taken to avoid these risks.

Davis told EHI Primary Care that these sorts of issues, alongside new issues that no-one had ever thought about, would probably be raised by the pilot sites. Davis said he believed patient record access via the internet would play an important part in how future records will work.

He added: “I think the eventual solution will be more radical and the world that I’d like to see us moving towards is where the patient is sovereign in all of this and we separate where records are held from the applications that produce those records.”

Interested practices should contact should contact Brian Fisher at brian.fisher403@ntlworld.com or Rob Murgatroyd at EMIS at mailto:rob.murgatroyd@e-mis.com.

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