Devon to get integrated care record

South Devon Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust has signed a contract with Intersystems for its HealthShare informatics platform to create an integrated digital care record.

The trust will use the platform as a health information exchange and clinical portal throughout South Devon and Torbay to join up patient information from health and social care.

Dr Mike Green, a consultant oncoplastic breast surgeon and chief clinical information officer at the trust, said the vision is to be “the best provider of healthcare services.”

“To achieve this, we recognise that the most significant gains are made when NHS organisations work together in partnership to ensure that care does not break down at the boundaries of organisations,” he said.

“We will now be able to manage patients’ care in a more joined up way, across the community, in primary and acute areas.”

South Devon received nearly £2m in funding from the first round of NHS England’s technology fund for the project, called ‘The Joined-Up Web-of-Care’.

The HealthShare platform will provide a clinical portal for clinicians across acute, community, mental health, social lcare and GP surgeries.

It will also serve as an analytics platform, turning the data into useful information to improve patient care and allow trusts to understand which resources and needs are required across care settings

South Devon, together with other trusts in the region, is one of 14 integration pioneer sites chosen by the Department of Health to lead the way on integrating health and social care through shared care records and other uses of technology.

Gary Hotine, director of the health informatics service at the trust said it us “firmly committed” to deliver integrated care.

“We already use two InterSystems products, the Ensemble integration platform and the Caché high-performance database, and HealthShare builds on these technologies,” he said.

“Our in-house IT team will implement the system, with training and mentoring from InterSystems, which puts us in control and ensures we need not rely on a third party to deliver the integrated digital care records.”