Shared Care Records and Digital Health Interoperability
Ensuring health and care professionals have up-to-date information is crucial. Better information means better care can be provided by giving the most appropriate treatment.
At present your medical information exists in a unique record per healthcare organisation or provider you visit, be it your local GP, the pharmacy, a physiotherapist, or A&E. This means organisations need to request access to your existing information to build up a patient profile and your bigger health picture.
This isn’t convenient, but a shared care record is. Shared care records help caregivers and clinicians by collating all of a patient’s information, but it’s the interoperability of health and care software that gives them access to this information at the point of care throughout a patient’s journey.
Funding shortfall, staff shortages, and increased life expectancy are all putting huge pressure on the NHS, and other care groups are experiencing similar difficulties. By pursuing opportunities to improve care and make care provision more efficient, healthcare organisations can reduce some of this pressure – allowing them to continue to be there for people in need. Joined-up care is the future, and NHS shared care records are a way to achieve this.
Shared care record
A shared care record is a collection of patient information that is stored in one area and that care providers can both contribute to and have access to, giving a full picture of those in their care. Care providers that typically contribute to an electronic shared care record include GPs, hospitals, community and mental health trusts, and social care providers.
By implementing shared care records, professionals have all the information they need at the point of care, enabling them to make informed decisions, not only in hospitals and GP surgeries but also in the community.
NHS shared care records are to become commonplace with the introduction of integrated care systems and integrated care boards to organise how the NHS and external health and care providers all work together, and this links in to interoperability.
Data Saves Lives NHS
The Data Saves Lives strategy is a government-driven initiative for the NHS. It is a government white paper (official policy document) that sets out a specific plan for the use of data in healthcare within England specifically (due to the devolved NHS).
The crux of the plan is to deliver shared care records across England, and the NHS Data Saves Lives branding is part of the PR approach to showcase what the NHS is doing to continue modernising. It also serves as encouragement for Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) to achieve the levels of onboarding required to properly integrate software solutions for the interoperability of a shared care record.
The NHS data saves lives strategy promises support but it’s unclear if this is financial, expertise, or both. The document does stress the importance of patient privacy through data protection though, in order to retain the public’s trust in the national health service, as well as demonstrating a standards roadmap that should be followed as part of the rollout. In total there are over 100 commitments within the plan.
An NHS England report from June 2023 provided an update regarding data saves lives NHS one year on, with Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) now responsible for “the planning and delivery of health and care services”. Each ICS now has a shared care record in place between NHS trusts and GP practices, and more is being done to incorporate social care.
Digital Health Interoperability
It’s a big word, but digital health interoperability simply refers to the ability of healthcare software to interact with other software. This is important because it establishes connectivity and secure communication between multiple and often disparate IT systems. It enables shared care records, allowing information inputted into an electronic patient record system to be securely accessed by GPs or social workers.
This brings us back to the point about ‘joined-up care’. Digital health interoperability helps to provide a more rounded view of a patient; helping those working across health and social care provide better care by enabling access to relevant, up-to-date information at the point of care delivery.
This means that there’s a full patient journey from initial consultation through to aftercare, but it also ensures high standards. Health and care professionals can read notes, monitor updates based on reports, and track key information about allergies, medication, and social factors – all at the point of care. This is exactly what the NHS Data Saves Lives strategy is all about.
Delayed access to essential services commonly affects vulnerable people because professionals and practitioners are unable to access a complete and up-to-date record. Making sure that software is interoperable counteracts this. Shared care records are truly shared, meaning less time spent chasing information and more time spent providing the very valuable care required.
Benefits of Digital Health Interoperability
Digital health interoperability benefits care providers and patients alike. Improved access to data means better patient management and better care provision. Healthcare professionals can understand someone’s needs and make better decisions about how to help.
The UK government has said that they want the NHS to be more efficient and less wasteful via the NHS Shared Care records. By utilising interoperable software it can achieve this. There’s less data duplication, less time wasted on record keeping, and better data accuracy – avoiding any inappropriate care action such as unnecessary appointments or visits, or the wrong medication. Unnecessary hospital admissions can be prevented. Safeguarding with alerts can speed up the response time for social workers and other support agents.
The patient’s experience is also important, and the patient does benefit from digital health interoperability – even if it is a mouthful to say. Shared care records, properly supported by software that can actually cooperate, mean that patients will feel actively involved in their own care. The frustration of telling different doctors or nurses your medical history is gone, cutting appointment times and the interference into their lives, but it opens appointments up to more of a discussion about the person.
The patient gets more of a say, more time to discuss the impact on them, and with healthcare professionals benefiting too, they’re likely to meet less frustrated staff and have an altogether more relaxed experience as they work hand-in-hand to formulate a care plan.
What is the NHS Spine?
So, what is NHS Spine? According to the NHS Digital website, NHS Spine is a support framework for NHS England’s health and social care IT infrastructure. The importance of utilising NHS Spine is data security; it enables private and encrypted data transmission through services such as the e-Referral Service and the Electronic Prescription Service.
The website boasts that Spine links 44,000 healthcare systems in 26,000 healthcare organisations, with 1.3 billion messages every month and, at peak times, 3200 messages a second which is an incredible volume of traffic.
How to use NHS Spine:
If you want to know how to use the NHS Spine API, you should speak to the NHS national service desk, but NHS employees (those in need) will have access to the Spine through the clinical systems (software solutions) or a direct NHS Spine portal to log in to.
More technical NHS Spine API information can be found at on the NHS Digital website’s developer section.
The Access Group and Digital Health Interoperability
The Access Group works with the Health Information Exchange (HIE) in regions across the UK, as well as with the NHS Spine portal. Access was also significantly involved with NHS Digital in establishing both the National Record Locator (NRL) and National Events Management Service (NEMS) which each play a part for the NHS Shared Care Records.
Beyond this we are helping develop local health and care records with the following groups:
- Lancashire Person Record Exchange Service (LPRES)
- Care Information Exchange (CIE)
- Somerset Integrated Digital electronic Record (SIDeR)
We are also working to integrate with other established providers and partner with many more to ensure our customers can easily integrate the systems they use including:
One example of partnership has been with Allocate Software, helping bring interoperability between their eCommunity platform and our Rio EPR software within Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.
Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust uses Rio EPR (electronic patient records) to document patient information throughout the care process, as well as Rio Mobilise in a community setting, but they use other software for staff management. By coming together and developing an application programming interface (API), the two computer programs can be instructed to cooperate, saving medical professionals from having to enter information twice over – a great time saver.
