Progress on the GP2GP electronic records transfer programme remains on track with plans to start testing iSoft’s Synergy system at the end of this month, the BCS Primary Health Care Specialist Group heard.
If testing goes to plan on the roadmap published by NHS Connecting for Health, Synergy will join Emis’ LV and INPS’ Vision 3 later this year in the ‘live GP estate’ of systems able to receive and send patient records to one another electronically.
Dr John Williams, GP2GP clinical safety testing lead, told the group’s summer conference that transfers were now around the 600,000 mark. “Nearly all eligible sites are live but it only involves these two systems. Others are lining up.”
The conference focused on patient safety and Dr Williams described the complex task of safety testing by the CfH team charged with ensuring that: meaning is preserved in transferred records; essential information is not lost and disorganisation, degradation and duplication are kept to a minimum.
Pragmatism was also needed, he said, though patient safety had been a top priority right from the start of the project.
Practical examples of some of the issues faced by CfH’s safety team were presented by Dr Leo Fogarty, clinical safety officer for the summary care record. He showed some transferred documents in a clinical record and challenges the audience to spot the potential hazard.
The problem was missing meta-data which meant that the record showed documents were present but offered no easy way of seeing what they contained unless the user opened them all – possibly a lengthy job for a busy GP.
Dr Fogarty said: “The judgement was made that the process of transferring records electronically was so valuable that this should be allowed to happen.”
But he added that documents should be renamed using appropriate software and that naming conventions were needed for documents that were moved.
Three different ways of representing allergy records were also shown. Dr Fogarty concluded that suppliers needed to be representing information consistently and that standardisation was needed in how allergies were reported.
An overview of CFH’s approach to patient safety came from the agency’s clinical director for patient safety, Dr Maureen Baker.
She traced CfH’s development of patient safety measures back to a report from the National Patient Safety Agency in 2004 which concluded that the National Programme for IT in the NHS was not addressing safety in a structured, proactive manner, as other safety critical industries would.
“The safety management system for the National Programme for IT was I believe the first in the NHS,” she said.
More remained to be done, however. Dr Baker said next steps would see the development of systems that were inherently safer.
She was also keen to see further work on the process of passing the “safety baton”, the process of handing systems over from CFH to implementing organisations and the consequent transfer of responsibility for patient safety.
Good practice required proactive work to produce systems as safe as design and forethought would allow along with reactive systems to detect errors, she concluded.