Quarter of practices link to Welsh SCR

More than 25% of GP practices in Wales are now feeding information into the country’s summary record via INPS’s Vision 360 data sharing solution.

INPS said it is streaming information from GP practices’ Vision 3 systems into its central Vision 360 repository to provide clinicians working out-of-hours with access to the Individual Health Record, Wales’ version of a summary record.

The company said communities now using Vision 360 include Pembrokeshire and Ceredigon, Aneurin Bevan and Cardiff and Cwm Taf, which between them have made 750,000 records available in the Vision 360 Patient Summary IHR.

There have been about 6,000 accesses to the IHR in the last 12 months using Vision 360, and INPS said accesses are currently running at about 700 views per month as more practices come on board.

Anglesey and Gwynedd are scheduled to go live in April and GP practices in Wrexham are planned to be switched on in June.

Tony Thorne, INPS business development director, said: “We are now halfway through the deployment programme in Wales with 126 practices sending data successfully into the IHR.

"We are delighted to support the IHR and see that the technology is creating tangible benefits to patients in Wales."

The NHS Wales Informatics Service announced last October that it had signed contracts with four suppliers – EMIS, INPS, iSoft and Adastra – to deliver the IHR across the country.

The IHR contains information on medications, allergies, adverse reactions, current problems and diagnoses and test results and is designed to be viewed in out-of-hours services with patient consent.

INPS was the first supplier to be signed up and this week. It said the benefits to patients include better quality care and improved safety, improved communication between clinicians, support to diagnose accurately in urgent situations and help to make appropriate treatment available quicker.

Earlier this month Edwina Hart, Welsh health minister, told the Welsh Assembly Government that Wales was a world leader in use of digital technologies and that the IHR was likely to extend across Wales by the end of this year.