Healthcare IT system supplier TPP has announced that its database of unique medical records, hosted by its software SystmOne, has exceeded 20m.
The company said the figures made it the biggest real-time patient database in the world.
TPP said nearly 60% of the records hosted on the SystmOne database are registered through SystmOne GP.
However, 5m children are registered on SystmOne Child Health, linking school healthcare with local child services and GPs.
TPP said it employed several full-time staff to monitor and improve the efficiency of its centralised servers.
It also said that recent improvements mean the database now takes up only about 18 terabytes of space, improving the speed of the system.
Phil Grayson from TPP’s technical team added: “Because we work with the Spine to match duplicate demographic details it means each of those 20m patient records is unique.”
TPP said the figures meant that around a third of the population in England had been treated by a health service using SystmOne.
Dr John Parry, TPP’s clinical director and a GP in Keighley, West Yorkshire, said: “Having so many patient records on the database means it’s much more likely that when a patient is seen, there will already be a match somewhere on SystmOne.
"This enables the clinician using the system to pull up the patient record, complete with all of the relevant medical information.”
Dr Parry said the database also had potential to build patient prediction tools which he said the company was working on with its Knowledge Transfer Partnership at Leeds University.