Electronic Social Care Record To Be Phased

The December 2004 target for implementing full electronic social care records (ESCR) is not achievable and the roll-out is now due to take place between 2008-2010, at the same time as the English NHS integrated care record service (ICRS), a conference heard this week.

Roger Staton, head of the Social Care Information Policy Unit at the Department of Health said that work was under way to look at the essentials that need to be in place by 2004 and what could be phased in later. A consultation paper will be published at the end of June 2003 and a 12 week response period will follow.

Mr Staton told E-Health Insider: “ICRS has helped to focus our thinking.”

Addressing a conference on social care and healthcare, organised by BJHC, Mr Staton described some of the complex issues that need to be addressed not only to produce electronic records for social care but to ensure that essential information can be exchanged across the services.

”There are a lot of challenges around that agenda,” he said.

Issues included: resolving connectivity issues between health and social care and finding common identifiers to link records in different systems. In the latter area, Mr Staton said talks were being held with the Information Commissioner on the use of the NHS number as an identifier and there was a lot of interest in that area.

Information governance – the new term embracing issues around confidentiality, consent, privacy and security of data – looms large for social care information policy makers as it does their opposite numbers in health. Mr Staton said guidance was in preparation and would be sent out for consultation. Links have also been established with the confidentiality workstream of the National Programme for IT in the NHS and the NHS Information Authority’s work on information governance.

Some areas are already rising to the challenges surrounding information exchange between health and social care. Tony Ellis, head of IT for social services in the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham described the JET (Joint Electronic Transfer) project which enables social services client information to be shared electronically with health partners across Jetweb, a secure extranet that uses widely available SSL (secure socket layer) software to create a 128bt encrypted link to health centres.

The project’s website has a toolkit with full details of how the JET team tackled security, consent and other issues. JET was piloted last year and is being rolled out to all health centres in the borough this year.

Joining up health and social care is only part of the picture, however. Mr Ellis explained: “It’s not just health and social services integration. There’s the council too, sitting on a pile of information.”

He said the council was interested in integrating all its data. Specifically, he outlined a project to share housing benefit data with social services, provided client consent is given. This is particularly useful because housing benefit data include full statement of the client’s income. Sharing that data saves having to gather it twice.