Barts Health NHS Trust is using Cerner’s Health Information Exchange to view a summary of patients’ GP records, embedded within its Millennium electronic patient record system.
Hospital clinicians can see GP data showing the patient’s problems, diagnoses, recent medications and recent diagnostic tests.
Patients must give explicit consent for staff to view their ‘community record’, though there is an exception in emergency situations.
Around 70% of GPs in Tower Hamlets have agreed to share their data and sign-ups are also going well in Newham. Their information is shared via Healthcare Gateway’s Medical Interoperability Gateway.
Only GPs using Emis are currently connected to the record-sharing project, which also allows them to view hospital information from their system. A number of GPs in the area use TPP, which has signed a contract with the MIG, but the functionality is still in pilot phase.
Barts’ chief information officer Luke Readman said GPs can only see attendance data, but will get access to future appointments in January.
“Over the years, the pressure has always been for hospitals to provide GPs with information electronically. There’s not many examples where it’s a two-way exchange of data, so this is a paradigm shift forward in what we are doing,” said Readman.
The project went live in early November and GPs and hospital clinicians are already asking for more information to be made available via the HIE. The data sharing agreements signed with GPs cover all summary information available via the MIG and the information available to hospital clinicians will soon be expanded.
Only coded data is used and there are certain exemptions such as sexual health status and other sensitive information.
Readman said that just a few weeks into the project, the trust already has a number of “really powerful stories about how it has changed patient care for the better”.
“We’re trying to get this going because the potential for that to occur for every single patient is very significant,” he said.
“It makes life better and easier for patients and clinicians in their day-to-day jobs to have information at their fingertips.”
Read more about Barts’ HIE project in Insight, or listen to the latest EHI Podcast to hear clinicians speak about the benefits of being able to view their patients’ community record.