Shared record system to connect NHS trusts in Lancs and South Cumbria
- 30 July 2018
Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust has launched an integrated care record system that will enable health and care providers in Lancashire and South Cumbria to share clinical information.
The Lancashire Person Record Exchange Service (LPRES) connects Lancashire Care with the IT systems of four other major hospital trusts, in addition to more than 300 GP practices, two upper tier authorities, Lancashire County Council and a number of private providers.
The service enables clinicians to share patient records and notes with other health and care organisations electronically, thus removing old and cumbersome paper-based processes.
It aims to improve patient care by allowing certain clinical records to be shared at the point where they are needed, the theory behind this being that clinicians will be able to make appropriate care decisions at an earlier stage, meaning patients get better treatment more quickly.
Dr Ayesha Rahim, deputy medical director at Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust (pictured), said: “This is a next-generation system, which will support electronic information sharing with all of our health and care partners, in a way that our current paper systems cannot.
“LPRES provides healthcare providers with a function where they can centralise and share key information enabling necessary data to flow between organisations in an easy, efficient and safe way.”
LPRES covers the entire population of Lancashire and South Cumbria, which accounts for approximately 1.7 million people.
Blackpool Teaching Hospital, Lancashire Teaching Hospital, East Lancashire Hospitals and University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay are all linked by the system, with North West Infrastructure Service acting as supplier.
Dr Rahim added: “We are so proud to be part of this innovation in digital health and are looking forward to continuing to work with our partners across the health and care system.”
The UK has seen a flurry of shared care record initiatives as of late, including projects in Dorset, Buckinghamshire, Surrey, and Yorkshire and Humber to name but a few.
NHS England’s Local Health and Care Record Exemplar (LHCRE) programme, meanwhile, is an attempt to kick-start record-sharing initiatives on a much wider scale.
A spokesperson from Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust told Digital Health News that the initiative was “very much in keeping with the ethos of sharing information across organisational healthcare boundaries.”
