Information solutions and consulting specialist, Newchurch Limited, has started work on the Tees Diabetes Integrated Record Service Pilot (ICRS) for County Durham and Tees Valley Strategic Health Authority. The pilot project, funded by the South Tees Hospitals NHS Trust, started last week and will continued until April 2004. The system developed will be used to integrate the primary and secondary care records of diabetic patients registered with up to 10 practices across North Tees, Middlesbrough and Hartlepool Primary Care Trusts. Kingsley Manning, Newchurch’s chief executive, said: “The project will be an excellent opportunity to show how data from primary and secondary care can be combined into one complete and comprehensive record. Diabetes specialists will gain huge benefits from instant access to an all round view of their patients’ overall health record. This will lead to lasting improvements in care and treatment.” Newchurch says that its messaging and integration tools will seamlessly combine data from a range of primary care clinical systems with the diabetic registers from North Tees & Hartlepool NHS Trust and South Tees Hospitals NHS Trust. Up until now these unconnected clinical systems have remained isolated islands of data preventing health professionals from gaining a full picture of a patient’s clinical history. The Teesside team chose Newchurch as partners after visiting the company’s original ICRS demonstration project in South Warwickshire. There they witnessed the benefits of integrating patient records across a healthcare area and were particularly impressed by the ease of access to drug histories in accident and emergency departments when patients are not always able to offer this information themselves. Potential benefits for diabetes care include the elimination of duplicate testing by GPs and hospitals and faster access to test results from both settings. A Newchurch spokeswoman said that at present primary care and hospital staff could not look up each others’ results. Hospital test results sent back to GPs currently take about two weeks to arrive. The integration of care records was identified as a national need by the Department of Health’s Diabetes Information Strategy published earlier this year. Integration was needed not only to support improved diabetes care but also to provide information for secondary purposes such as health surveillance and healthcare improvement, the strategy document said.
