A consortium of acute and primary care trusts across Kent and Medway strategic health authority have selected McKesson’s CarePlus child health IT system to provide a new single shared solution.
McKesson’s CarePlus system will provide the NHS organisations with one integrated database, shared central procedures for child healthcare delivery and new interfaces with community-based child healthcare IT systems and procedures.
Nine PCTs and three acute trusts form the consortium, which is implementing CarePlus as a replacement for an existing 15-year old child health computing system.
As part of the CarePlus implementation McKesson worked with the NHS organisations to integrate the six separate databases which existed within the old system. As a result it has been possible to merge close to 62,000 duplicate records out of a total of 752,724 records extracted.
Morfydd Williams, Kent and Medway Health Informatics Service project director, said: “The fact that we needed to find a new child health IT system provided us with the ideal opportunity to put in place a solution that would enable us to have one record for each child in the Strategic Health Authority."
Williams added “Not only is the new IT system reducing the amount of time spent by healthcare providers within the individual trusts on administrative tasks, thereby making us more efficient and effective, but it is also reducing the potential for errors in childrens’ patient records which of course means a better level and quality of healthcare across the region.”
Under the new solution, each PCT and acute Trust will have access to the centrally-held child health records. However the system remains flexible enough to accommodate local working procedures where, for example, collaboration between the trust and other healthcare professionals in the local community might be required.
Williams added: “We opted for McKesson’s CarePlus system because it was fully web-enabled; a piece of functionality that would make it easier for us to give all the various users across the different trusts access to the relevant information."
Future plans include integrating the data within CarePlus with community-based child health systems and information, such as vaccinations conducted within schools and even social services.
Williams concluded: “There has been a team of dedicated healthcare professionals across the authority who have worked very hard, in partnership with McKesson, to implement the solution in such a way that it meets both our short-term central and local requirements, as well as providing us with a stable base for future growth and development."