Scottish clinicians get KIS via portal

Clinicians in South-East Scotland are accessing patients’ Key Information Summaries through their health boards’ clinical portal from Harris.

Scotland’s KIS is an extension of Scotland’s Emergency Care Summary and contains information from the GP practice including diagnosis, current issues and carer and support details.

The integration with the clinical portal from Harris Healthcare and Capita Managed IT Solutions, means that four health boards in the South-East consortium can access the detailed patient information more easily.

Jonathan Cameron, KIS programme manager at NHS National Services Scotland IT, told EHI that access through the portal has been live for a couple of weeks and he is keen to see it rolled out very quickly.

“The big step forward for us with the portal access to the KIS is that it gives a group of clinicians access more quickly,” he said.

“The portal access took away a lot of the integration issues, so it’s much easier getting clinicians to access the KIS. With just one log in they don’t have to remember several passwords and they get access to other information alongside it through the portal. It becomes a lot easier for them to use the information available to them.”

More than 40,000 people have created a KIS with their GP, which is available to secondary care clinicians, ambulance staff and nursing home staff.

Clinicians in NHS Lothian, NHS Dumfries and Galloway, NHS Fife and NHS Borders can access it through the portal.

NHS Lothian is the first health board to take advantage of the integration. Kelly Smith, patient portal project manager at the board, said that accessing patient details at the “click of a button” is a big step forward for clinicians.

“Allowing clinicians across care settings to better understand the complete picture of a patient’s medical history and care is an essential component of an integrated health service and will undoubtedly help to enable continuity of care,” she said.

As part of Scotland’s wider e-health strategy, the KIS will continue to be rolled out with increased capability and NHS Scotland will develop and publish a Health and Social Care Information Sharing Strategic Framework this year.

Cameron said that the KIS is key to sharing patient information and a proper benefit analysis will be done in a few months’ time.

“We’re working on a final evaluation of the KIS, so by summertime we’ll have a more scientific benefit analysis of how it has gone so far,” he said.

The team behind Scotland’s KIS won the award for ‘excellence in major healthcare IT development’ in the EHI Awards 2013. The 2014 awards opened today.