Care plans shared with InterSystems

London's care plan sharing scheme Coordinate My Care has gone live with InterSystems’ HealthShare.

Coordinate my Care provides opt-in urgent care plans for more than 25,000 patients in London and Surrey Downs, including information on the patient’s preferred place to die and do-not-resuscitate orders.

The programme is using HealthShare to electronically share these plans with all staff involved in a patient’s care including urgent care settings such as ambulance, NHS 111 and A&E staff. They are also available in real time to GPs, community nurses, hospices, social workers, care homes and community palliative care teams.

The programme’s leaders hope the new IT system, which was due to go-live in September but delayed until late November, will make creating personalised urgent care plans easier and more accessible and drive further uptake of the scheme. 

Future plans include increasing interoperability to ultimately allow users to seamlessly use the CMC service from within their host IT systems where appropriate.

A link with Emis Health will go live this month allowing users to access CMC from within Emis Web without a separate login. The team is talking to TPP, Vision, and Adastra to establish similar ‘in context linking’ in the 2016.

Patients will also be able to access a read only version of their care plan from the New Year and there are plans to develop a fully integrated and interactive patient portal by the summer of 2016. 

“The vision for the portal is that patients will be able to self enrol and start developing their own personalised urgent care plan from home. This will give patients the space to think through their key preferences and wishes and then discuss these with their chosen clinician to get the plan ratified and approved,” a spokesperson for The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, which hosts the programme, said. 

“Patients and their carers will also be able to update aspects of their care plans as their healthcare situation evolves.” 

John Middleton, the General Manager of CMC ,said 79% of patients with a CMC plan who have died since creating their urgent care plan, died in their place of choice. 

“We have invested in a new IT system after listening to our users to ensure as many patients and clinicians benefit from this vital service”. 

One week on from go-live on 24 November, there were more than 220 users accessing the system across 108 separate organisations. 

The system, created in partnership with InterSystems, is accompanied by online e-learning training modules, for which 400 people have signed up since the launch last week.