North of Scotland Care Portal goes live with Orion Health

A clinical portal covering some of the most remote areas in the north of Scotland has gone live with users already beginning to sign up.

The North of Scotland (NoS) Care Portal, commissioned by four NHS boards and built using Orion Health technology, gives staff working in NHS Grampian, NHS Highland, NHS Orkney, and NHS Shetland a single view of patient information held in different IT systems.

A launch event was held at Inverness’ Raigmore Hospital on 14 February, to enable clinicians to see how the portal will make it easier to access patient details, tests, scans and documents and to share information with colleagues across the region.

Jim Docherty, NHS Highland clinical lead for eHealth, said: “This is all about giving clinicians quick and easy access to information.

“The NoS Care Portal takes information from many different systems and displays it all in one place and in context. It will save clinicians a lot of time and should make it much easier to care for patients who need to travel between NHS boards for treatment.”

Orion’s clinical portal allows information currently held in the two patient management systems used by the four NHS boards and the three Scottish Care Information Stores in the region, to be held in one system.

The next step will be to make GP and social care data viewable, alongside acute patient information.

Further developments may also include the roll-out of Orion Health functionality to manage patient pathways and let clinicians set up collaborative worklists to support team working across the region.

The NoS Care Portal, which is hosted by NHS Grampian, has already established a link with the Orion Health Clinical Portal launched by NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde.

The portal team is talking to two more NHS boards about linking to their Orion Health clinical portals, in line with the Scottish Government’s latest eHealth Strategy which aspires to join up IT systems and support a single integrated health and care patient record.

Gary Birks, general manager at Orion Health said: “We are pleased to see the NoS Care Portal already supporting the needs of clinicians and their patients so soon after the go-live.

“The portal has been designed around the care priorities of stakeholders, so it’s great to see it starting to deliver on their vision of efficient and effective care for every patient.”