St Helen Cares has gone live with a shared record system provided by Graphnet to improve care in the Merseyside town.
Social care teams at the council, staff at St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, GPs, community and mental health workers and other teams now have access to the health and care records of the boroughs 178,500 residents.
The local care system is working with System C & Graphnet Care Alliance to improve the quality of care it provides and reduce unnecessary admissions, with the first initiative to introduce electronic care plans to tackle frailty already underway.
The team then intends to extend the solution by introducing care plans into other specialty pathways, such as for patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), where multi-provider working is needed.
Since the go-live social care staff have been able to access patient information at the touch of a button, replacing the lengthy process of emails and phones calls they were using before.
Christine Walters, IT lead for St Helens Cares and chief information officer at St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals, said: “This is early days yet, but we are seeing huge enthusiasm from social care teams, GPs and acute clinicians.
“It is very exciting to be involved in a deployment which delivers so quickly, and which we can now expand on by developing new care plans and pathways, for example, and bringing in new parts of the health and care economy.”
St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals trust also deployed System C’s Medway patient administration system (PAS) within its two main acute sites, St Helens and Whiston, as well as Newton hospital last year.
It includes the implementation of several System C solutions, including order communications, emergency department, results reporting and business intelligence software, as well to “a number of complex integrations” into existing systems at St Helens and Knowsley.