Bristol is up for ConnectingCare

Three hospitals, three primary care trusts and three local authorities in Bristol are working to develop a single electronic care record for the local health community.

Weston Area Health NHS Trust, University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust and North Bristol NHS Foundation Trust, plus the local authorities and PCTs covering Bristol, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset, are steering away from implementing the Summary Care Record. 

They plan instead to use the Interoperability Toolkit to create a system that will allow clinicians and social care workers to share information while working in their own clinical systems.

The organisations are in the early stages of developing the business case.

However, Martin Bell, IT director for North Bristol told eHealth Insider: “Whatever happens with the NHS reforms in terms of organisations coming or going we want to be able to provide information to staff across the whole spectrum.

“We want to create a portal that will provide a common view of that information which becomes more and more useful the more it is populated and you can really get at those information nuggets.”

Initial trials, which may be underway towards the end of the year, will look at three priority areas – urgent care, intermediate care services and child health.

Bell said: “For example, if a social care organisation in a Bristol notes that a child could be at risk it could take several days to be communicated to other organisations, if at all.

"But if you had the integration to get that information to the emergency department by that afternoon, when a child shows you with a black eye, you know that there’s a problem.”

Andy Kinnear, the head of Avon IM&T consortium, which manages IT services on behalf of the three PCTs, told EHI that the organisations will initially look at the technology side by addressing how the system will take form.

Kinnear said: “We’re not out to procurement stage yet but think they’ll be elements of a shared record, portal type technology, context integration, SSO, patient indexing and much more. It’s going to be a very complex project.”

He added: “The second part that we are addressing is around the information governance. If we’re going to take this forward we will need the most robust information governance-possibly in the whole of the NHS – that will obviously take some time to do.”

The organisations already have firm building blocks in the form of RiO for community health, Mckesson CarePlus for child health, Northgate and Paris systems for social care, and Cerner Millennium, which is due to go live at North Bristol at the end of 2011.

In addition, the majority of the GPs use EMIS and Adastra systems. Bell added: “Yes there are a lot of systems to get to talk to each other but GPs in particular have pretty good data and we have a really solid IM&T team.”