Cheshire shares records across 80 organisations

Cheshire has gone live with a shared care record that covers acute, primary, council, community, mental health and cancer data across the region using Graphnet’s CareCentric.

More than 80 health and care organisations are participating in the Cheshire Care Record, with 44 million clinical records availableover the system.

Work on the record began 18 months ago, and there are now operational feeds from two Cheshire councils, acute, specialist, mental health, and community NHS trusts along with four CCGs, covering 739,000 people.

Jackie Miller, project manager for Cheshire Care Record, said: “It has been a significant undertaking, but it does demonstrate a great partnership working across Cheshire”.

“I think we have achieved the most of any shared care record in the country, in that I think we are the only shared care record that has the breadth of data covering social, primary, community, acute and cancer care.”

Each participating partner provides a data feed into CareCentric, and then authorised staff can access a read only record.

There is GP data from 79 GP practices, with 11 still to participate.

Miller said the next steps were about “adding more users, rather than more data feeds”.  Early discussions were underway with out-of-hours services, hospices and the North West Ambulance Service NHS Trust to provide access to the record.

Markus Bolton, a director at Graphnet, said: “What they have really achieved at Cheshire is getting so much buy-in from so many organisations”.

“They are politically very difficult to put together these projects, and where they should really get their pat on the back is for getting so many organisations to contribute their data.”

Bolton said that since the “mega roll-out” in June, users have been growing by about 6% a week with an expected 2000 users by the end of the year.

Earlier this year, 17 health and social care organisations in Berkshire began sharing care records using the CareCentric software. Last year Graphnet was used to build share care record in Sutton, to exchange information between between the local council and CCG, and in Manchester between three CCGs and the city council.

Participating organisations in Cheshire include: Cheshire East Council, Cheshire West and Chester Council, South Cheshire, Vale Royal CCG, East Cheshire, West Cheshire CCG, Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS FT, East Cheshire NHS Trust, The Christie NHS FT, Clatterbridge Cancer Centre NHS FT, Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS FT and Countess of Chester NHS FT.