17 orgs tender for central care record

Seventeen health and social care organisations across Birmingham, Sandwell and Solihull have gone out to tender for a joint central care record system.

NHS Central Midlands Commissioning Support Unit is leading the tender on behalf of local clinical commissioning groups, mental health, acute, community and ambulance trusts as well as local councils.

The tender says the goal is to make information for an initial 1.6m people available to health and social care staff, wherever the patient is being treated.

A CSU spokesperson said: “The central care record involves the sharing of patient data by the major health and social care organisations from the area to ensure each has access to a wider range of patient data to aid decision making.”

The organisations are looking for a system that provides integration, a data repository, a health and social care portal, a patient portal and data extraction for business intelligence, which is able to deal with multiple systems and standards.

“The health and social care portal will allow users to login to the portal and view appropriate information based on their role or position,” the tender says.

“The care portal must have the ability to view a citizen’s record as at a point in time; this will enable tracking of what a user saw at any given point in time.”

“The system will be built using web services (using an open API), so that organisations do not have to log into an application, but can consume the web services and build the functionality into their own systems if required.”

The CSU said the aim is for information to be recorded once, and shared between joined up systems.

“The CCR is expected to enable improvements in health and social care outcomes, as clinical decisions improve with better information, resulting in fewer mistakes after discharges and transfers of care,” said the spokesperson.

The group is planning to go live in two phases. The first will involve implementing the system based on the primary care dataset only.

The second will involve setting up the data warehouse and incorporating the remaining datasets from other organisations to deliver the full CCR.

“Given the type of service being procured and the potential for streamlining processes and economies of scale across the 17 organisations collaborating in this project, we do not have a final figure for the contract at this stage,” said the CSU spokesperson.

“We are testing the market to obtain competitive bids, which will enable us to award the contract to the provider who offers the best value for money.”

The organisations hope to award a contract in early 2014 with a provisional go-live date set for about a year after that.

The five-year contract will have an option of extending for another two years.

The project is led by a project board, chaired by Dr Nick Harding, chair of Sandwell and West Birmingham CCG, and co-chaired by Aresh Anwar, medical director of Heart of England Foundation Trust.

The other organisations involved in the procurement are: Birmingham CrossCity CCG; Birmingham South Central CCG; Solihull CCG; Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Trust; Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust; University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust; Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust; Black Country Partnership NHS Foundation Trust; West Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust; The Royal Orthopaedic Hospital NHS Foundation Trust; Birmingham Children’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust; Birmingham Women’s NHS Foundation Trust; Birmingham City Council; Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council; and Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council.