Trust and council in discharge first

Whittington Health and Islington Council have become the first organisations in the country to go live with a new project to improve information sharing between the NHS and social care.

The aim of the Adapter Project, run by the Health and Social Care Information Centre, is to allow health and social care professionals to more easily share electronically share patient discharge information.

Delays in exchanging information about proposed discharge dates and a patient’s needs can be a major cause of delayed discharges from acute settings into the community.

Whittington and Islington have worked with software providers Liquidlogic, System C and Quicksilva to implement the system, becoming the first organisations to undergo final testing and take the Adapter system live.

The system allows discharge notices to be securely exchanged between Whittington’s System C Medway patient administration system and Islington’s Liquidlogic social care case management system.

Social care teams at Islington will receive automated alerts in the Liquidlogic system from the Medway PAS, alerting them that a vulnerable adult in Whittington’s care is about to be discharged from hospital.

This should help to make sure that services and support can be put into place at the point of discharge.

Glenn Winteringham, Whittington’s IM&T director, said the project “is a very important and concrete example of how IT can be used to transform service delivery for the direct benefit of patients."

“The automatic transmission of patient information will make it so much easier to ensure that vulnerable patients are discharged seamlessly into the community, with the right levels of support in place to meet their particular needs.”

Michael Woolcott, head of information services at Islington, said the software will help the council to improve its joint working with health agencies.

David Grigsby, director of Liquidlogic, said: “We are delighted to be involved with a ground-breaking project which delivers such huge benefits for everyone involved, both in terms of service efficiency and improvements in care.”