ITK funding links telehealth to records

South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust is using ITK funding to link information from telehealth devices to the trust’s clinical records.

The trust provides community, mental health and learning disability services and uses TPP’s SystmOne.

Paul Foster, associate director of IM&T at South West Yorkshire, told EHI that with most staff using SystmOne and patients using telehealth devices, it made sense to link the two.

“Patients use telehealth devices that are installed in their homes, they answer a number of questions related to their health which are sent down a secure telephone line where a team of nurses monitor the information and flag up anything important,” he said.

“We wanted to look at ways of how we could look at information and get that into the clinical record. Already having SystmOne within the trust, it provides the ability to share the information and get specialists and other professionals involved in the care process.”

Foster said he hoped the ITK funding, which was awarded to 43 different NHS projects including four telehealth projects, would help improve clinical outcomes and efficiency.

“At the moment our staff have to log in between different systems. Because SystmOne is used quite widely already, it will improve information sharing and further enhance the patient experience,” he explained.

“It’s about information flowing the right way, what we’re not trying to do is replicate what the system already provides.”

He was optimistic that the trust would meet the March deadline set by the Department of Health for completing the projects.

“We’re obviously fully committed to the March deadline and we definitely will make it in part,” he said.

“But in the long-term we’re looking to expand into doing it two ways, linking SystmOne into the telehealth system as well, but that’s probably a while down the line.”

The project involves linking just one of the trust’s telehealth solutions with the clinical records, but Foster said that the ITK process would enable standardisation of services.

“What we want to do is get it to the stage where we can click in SystmOne and it will open the telehealth system and pull the patient details through.”

The ITK fund was launched by the DH last August to support information sharing projects that can be replicated across the NHS through the interoperability toolkit.