Royal Wolverhampton gets GP records link

Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals NHS Trust has become the latest to give its clinicians direct access to GP records from within its electronic patient record, using the Graphnet CareCentric platform.

The trust has embedded CareCentric into its in-house clinical portal, so staff can call up a patient’s primary and community records without having to log-into a separate system.

Some 40 GP practices are feeding into CareCentric and making their records available this way.

“You just click on the CareCentric Embedded button in the portal and ‘bang’ – you’ve suddenly got the GP in the room with you,” Simon Parton, head of software services at the trust said in a statement.

“This is something that clinicians have wanted for a considerable time. By bringing together GP, community and care data they get a much more complete picture of their patient’s needs.”

Graphnet’s CareCentric shared care record is used by a number of healthcare communities to share information between different healthcare organisations.

It is probably best known as the basis of the Hampshire Health Record, which started in 2005, and now holds 87m documents that can be accessed by 8,500 unique users.

These include staff at University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, who also have single sign-on through their electronic patient record.

Other areas using CareCentric include Dorset, where 5,000 users at the local acute trust, clinical networks, GP practices, social services, community teams, and community hospitals are live with the system.

NHS Wolverhampton Clinical Commissioning Group is also using CareCentric to pull information from GPs in its area to create a single electronic record for the 16,500 people in its area with diabetes.

Graphnet says the CCG is also using the CareCentric business intelligence solution to analyse data from GP practices and the acute trust and risk stratify patients for specific medical interventions.