Bedfordshire hospitals launch shared health and care record
Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust partners with InterSystems to unify patient data
InterSystems is partnering with Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust to develop a new shared health and care record, which is being rolled out across Bedfordshire and Luton.
The record is bringing together residents’ data from all local health and social care providers, giving health and care professionals access to a complete picture of a patient’s health and care, helping them make more-informed decisions.
InterSystems’ HealthShare advanced interoperability platform has been in deployment at the trust since September 2020 and in live operation since April 2021, and it provided the foundation for the hospital’s new clinical portal, which launched in April 2022.
The portal provides a single point of access to relevant primary and secondary patient data for direct care purposes, helping Bedfordshire, Luton, and Milton Keynes (BLMK) Health and Care Partnership, the Integrated Care System that brings together all NHS and local authority partners across the area, achieve more-integrated, co-ordinated care.
Since the partnership began in 2020, the ICS has seen a strong take-up in Bedford Hospital and Luton and Dunstable University Hospital and with GP surgeries across the area.
As a result, GPs have gained access to relevant hospital information when managing complex cases and hospital clinicians are able to reconcile regular medications on a patient’s admission more efficiently.
The new clinical portal builds on advances already made and work is underway to include patient and service user data from additional health and social care sources such as local councils, the ambulance service, and other shared care records across England.
By facilitating flows of information between different systems, the partnership will also help deliver on the Health and Social Care Bill 2022 by addressing the barriers to joined-up working via data sharing between health and social care.
Mark Thomas, chief information officer at Bedfordshire, Luton, and Milton Keynes Health and Care Partnership, said: “It’s hard to overstate the importance information sharing in the health and care sector.
“InterSystems is supporting us in Bedfordshire and Luton, offering local health and care professionals access to the most-accurate, holistic, and up-to-date information about the residents they look after and deliver on efforts to achieve more-integrated care across the NHS.”
Chris Norton, managing director for the UK and Ireland at InterSystems, added: “Achieving better and more-joined-up care requires close collaboration between various organisations including, but not limited to, local councils, the NHS, and other partners.
“A shared health and care record – which could not be possible without widespread interoperability – plays an instrumental role in making that possible and we’re very proud to be partnering with Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS FoundationTrust and supporting BLMK Health and Care Partnership in this effort to join up health and care and are excited to see what else we will go on to achieve over the coming months.”
