Thousands of Londoners are to have greater say over their care in a drive to increase the use of shared digital care records for ambulances, emergency departments and other urgent care services.
The South London Health Innovation Network (HIN) has won £200,000 funding to roll out Coordinate My Care (CMC) to ensure health and social care professionals have access to patient’s urgent care plans.
The care plan is designed to share the most important, up to date clinical information about the patient, including who to contact in an emergency.
This information is then shared with all health and social care professionals involved in treating them, such as 111, out of hours GPs, the London Ambulance Service and hospital emergency departments.
Zoe Lelliott, chief executive of the HIN, said: “Helping patients across London to better express their wishes about their care is very important at this time. We are extremely pleased to have this opportunity to work with Coordinate My Care and our NHS and care system colleagues to not only improve the quality of digital urgent care records but speed up the adoption and spread of this technology.
“HIN seeks to speed up spread and adoption, so where innovations like digital urgent care records have been shown to be effective, we believe that it’s important to work with our NHS and care colleagues to adopt this technology to better meet patients’ needs.”
The HIN is working closely with NHS colleagues across London to identify a project in each of the five sustainability and transformation partnership (STP) areas to accelerate the adoption of CMC to match address local priorities.
The scheme will fund local clinicians to focus on championing CMC with their peers and clinical colleagues with the aim to embed CMC in local care pathways.
CMC already supports about 115,000 Londoners with their care plans.
Professor Julia Riley, founder and clinical lead for Coordinate My Care, added: “As the coronavirus pandemic continues, we are hearing that many patients and families are talking about difficult futures, challenging decisions and appropriate treatments.
“This partnership with the Health Innovation Network means that health care services across the community will be supported to encourage increasing numbers of patients to have a digital CMC record, to ensure their wishes are recorded, to better their outcomes and to support the urgent care services.”