Stockport deploys end of life portal

NHS Stockport Clinical Commissioning Group has gone live with a portal to co-ordinate the delivery of services and support to patients with palliative care needs.

The CCG’s solution, known as the End of Life Portal for Anticipatory Care, is being used by care providers in NHS organisations, social services, and in community-based teams to access key information about a patient’s personal care preferences.

The portal fully interacts with primary care systems and automatically pulls through key clinical data such as demographics, current medications, allergies and adverse drug reactions from GP systems.

It has been developed as a clinical extension to the Stockport Health Record, a cross-community electronic shared care record built with Graphnet’s CareCentric software. The record holds data on 363,000 patients that is pulled from primary care and acute systems.

Paul Fleming, Stockport’s associate director of IM&T, said the CCG wanted to integrate multi-disciplinary teams and adopt a solution which allowed support and input from across health and social care.

Fleming said using the record as a foundation for the portal means that much of the relevant data is automatically updated in real-time with “no need for duplication”.

 “Users across the health and care economy will have immediate access to both the end of life system and the wider health record.”

The portal will ensure that patient’s wishes are “clear and accessible to everyone when and where they are needed” without the need for them to repeat sensitive information, he said.

The record and portal use the Graphnet’s CareCentric platform and End of Life solution to integrate the required data and to drive coordinated data collection and recording of palliative care information.

Providers in Stockport with access to the record include GP practices, mental health trusts, out of hours providers, acute and community professionals including specialist palliative care services, and the Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council. The local hospice and community pharmacists are next to be integrated.

The portal can be embedded in existing systems with single-sign on access, allowing health and social care users to access relevant information within patient context directly from their own computer records.

The CCG said the solution may also help to reduce unnecessary or inappropriate hospital admissions, with reductions in unscheduled care due to better communication between providers.

Brian Waters, chief executive of Graphnet, said the company is delighted to have worked with Stockport on the project.

“Stockport EPAC is an excellent example of how shared records and care plan management across multiple care settings can be combined to provide real benefits to patients and service delivery,” Waters said.