New board will expand SCR

A new advisory body is being created to look at expanding the Summary Care Record to include non-GP information such as hospital data.

The Department of Health told eHealth Insider that it is recruiting a chair for a new group, the Summary Care Record Content and Advisory Board, which will look at including information from non-GP settings.

The creation of an advisory board was recommended in The Ministerial Review of the Summary Care Record, which reported in October 2010.

The review recommended that the government should only consider expanding the SCR when it has “built trust in the system and when patients request that we do so.”

An Additional Information Working Group has also been looking at how extra information can be added more simply and consistently to SCRs via GP systems, with explicit consent from patients.

The working group is looking at successful implementations in Scotland and Wales and includes representatives of professional bodies, patient groups and GP system suppliers.

At the moment, the SCR contains a core set of essential information, including a patient’s demographics details, medications, allergies and adverse reactions.

A Department of Health SCR Programme Update for October revealed that 73% of out-of-hours doctors using the records feel they have increased patient safety.

But 74% said that having additional information on the record would increase their ability to make informed decisions.

Leeds Teaching Hospital NHS Trust chief clinical information officer Tony Shannon said it would be helpful to see more information on the SCR.

“The idea that there’s a central authority deciding what’s useful to share and what’s not, is limiting,” he explained.

Shannon, who is a consultant in emergency medicine, said he wanted to share emergency discharge summaries via the SCR, but could not.

He also argued that two thirds of records need to be uploaded in any one area, before the record ‘goes live’ for clinical users.

When the SCR programme was first announced the aim was to have full roll-out by the end of 2008.

However, the latest Operating Framework target requires completion of roll-out by the end of 2012-13, subject to the availability of compliant systems. About 14m patients have a record so far.

This includes about 1.1m each in London and North East, 1m in the North West, 1.9m in both the East of England and West Midlands, 1.4m in the South West, 2.9m in Yorkshire and the Humber, 740,000 in East Midlands, nearly 1.3m in South East Coast and 480,000 in South Central.

Yorkshire and the Humber has created SCRs for 53% of its population and assistant chief information officer Tony Megaw is confident the strategic health authority will have completed full roll-out by March next year.

He said early delays in product availability have been largely overcome, public information programmes have been completed, and implementation projects are “fully mobilised”.

NHS East Midlands plans to have completed the SCR roll-out everywhere but Leicestershire by the end of 2013.

The area has 1.9m patients with records and a patient population of 4.3m. A spokesperson said GP system compliance had been a “major barrier” to implementation and primary care trusts are concentrating on uploading records from practices with an SCR compliant system.