Surrey and Borders select Better and Avenue3 for new integrated platform

Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust has selected Better to provide a new digital health platform and Avenue3 to implement a mental health patient portal.

Better’s digital health platform will help health and care partners to communicate about a person’s care more easily and securely.

The vendor-neutral platform based on openEHR technology allows authorised health and care professionals to access information in real-time, contribute towards a single care record, and use low-code development tools to create applications for use at the point of care.

It is expected to go live later this year and will support the trust’s ambition to digitise and integrate mental health and learning disability services across its geographical area and underpin the transformation of services.

Better digital health platform, built on openEHR open-data standards, will be used to store data. Engineering specialists Avenue3 will support this roll-out by implementing a mental health patient portal on top of the platform.

The portal is expected to be co-designed with service and system users and the initiative is set to enable significant enhancements in the quality of care.

Dr Ayesha Rahim, consultant psychiatrist and chief medical information officer at Surrey and Borders Partnership, said: “Moving to a secure open data platform opens up opportunities for us to better share valuable information with health and care partners to offer timelier and more joined-up care.

“We will be co-designing the patient portal with people who use our services, their families and carers and clinicians to ensure that it is built around meeting the needs of users.”

Users of the new patient portal should be able to record and track their own outcome measures from any device with a web browser. It is expected to enable the data to be reflected on the person’s electronic patient record within the current ecosystem at the trust, enabling clinicians to support people who use the trust’s services to take greater control of their care.

A second phase of the project will enable key data about a person’s physical health held by other health and care providers to be captured within the trust’s patient record, supporting the NHS Long Term Plan’s target to increase physical health checks for people with severe mental illness.

Darren Ransley, managing director UK&I at Better, said: “Unified and readily available patient data is the lifeblood of any healthcare organisation. We are delighted that a trust as innovative as SABP has selected Better and our digital health platform to support their integrated care journey.

“We are seeing momentum towards healthcare organisations choosing digital health platforms, open data, and open standards and are happy that Surrey and Borders Partnership is leading the way for mental health providers in England.”