Birmingham Portal drives info sharing

Birmingham Health and Wellbeing Partnership has selected Dotted Eyes’ Health Portal to enable information sharing with GPs and between NHS and local authority organisations.

The partnership, an alliance between the city’s primary care trusts and council to tackle health inequalities and improve health outcomes, said the portal would help it to meet the demands of the white paper, ‘Equity and excellence: Liberating the NHS’.

Jim McManus, joint director of public health, said: “Health Portal will equip the partnership to take information sharing to new levels.

"In opening up data access at both senior and departmental levels across the BHWP, facilitating GP access, and enabling temporary and shifting healthcare considerations, we see Health Portal enabling hugely improved decision-making at the ‘coalface’.”

McManus said the Health Portal would help the partnership to provide more effective and cost-effective services to support the new commissioning structure. He said it would also deliver on health improvements and public health outcomes, while meeting the onus on joint partnerships in the white paper.

In the first phase of the roll out will begin this summer. In the first phase, the Health Portal will enable NHS bodies including GP consortia to access information such as lifestyle data, hospital admissions and death from diseases.

In later phases, the partnership intends to open up access to external data sharing with wider public services including local authorities and emergency and social services.

Data and information specialists Dotted Eyes said it works with 900 public and private sector organisations including 130 PCTs and all ambulance services in England and Wales.

Ben Allan, managing director at Dotted Eyes, said the Health Portal was a single platform which enabled access to information by a wider reach of healthcare professionals from midwives to clinical directors and commissioners.

He added: “By late autumn it will meet [health secretary] Andrew Lansley’s public facing directives to enable patients to access personal information, effectively facilitating the ‘no decision about me, without me’ coalition government healthcare mantra.”