Final phase of Cheshire and Merseyside child health project goes live

The final phase of a project to join up more than half a million records of children across the whole of Cheshire and Merseyside has gone live.

The Cheshire and Merseyside Child Health Information Service (CHIS) was broken down into three phases. The latest go-live across St Helens and Knowsley, Wirral and Warrington was the final step in the programme. Cheshire migrated last year during the first Covid-19 lockdown and Liverpool and Sefton followed further into the restrictions.

Bringing St Helens and Knowsley, Wirral and Warrington onboard System C’s CarePlus service involved migrating 372,000 children’s records from three instances of TPP and one instance of RiO child health simultaneously.

The fully digital service is playing an important role in public health for Cheshire and Merseyside’s children.  Care professionals can track children from childhood through to their transition to adult services and have access to all the relevant information to provide suitable care.

The new CarePlus service is connected to the Spine and the National Events Management Service which means users are receiving birth notifications, change of addresses, change of GP practices, death notifications and the three screening events (NIPE, hearing and bloodspot outcomes) from the outset.

Sue Trinder, child health information services director South, Central and West Commissioning Support Unit, said Cheshire and Mersey GP immunisation data is now being added into the Cheshire and Merseyside CHIS from the region’s Combined Intelligence for Population Health Action (CIPHA) data repository.

“Before this link, the child health admin and support team had to manually update data from paper forms and telephone/fax GP practices to validate the lists of children that required vaccination, resulting in extra work for both the team and the GP practices,” Trinder added.

The CIPHA data repository is part of the St Helens shared care record, which is delivered by Graphnet.

Having a process in place to automatically extract and upload the GP immunisation data into CarePlus is ensuring the correct children are targeted for immunisation and mitigates the risk of over-vaccination. In addition, it reduces the burden on practices dealing with telephone calls from the team and the amount of clinician time spent on data reconciliation.

Markus Bolton, joint chief executive of System C, added: “This has been a huge achievement for South, Central and West to successfully deliver the new service during a very challenging year.

“I’m very proud that the project is already delivering such clear benefits to care professionals, the service, and to patients.”

We are the hosts of Digital Health Rewired 2021, the must-attend virtual festival celebrating the best of digital health and care, taking place across 15-19 March 2021. Get a flavour of Rewired 2021 from the video below. You can book your place here