31.07.13
Transforming safeguarding through data-sharing
Source: National Health Executive July/August 2013
NHS Central Eastern CSU is attempting to achieve better sharing of information between different clinical and care settings in the region, starting with a new portal to allow GPs to see safeguarding information on children they think may be at risk. NHE spoke to the CSU’s assistant director of ICT informatics and chief information officer, Lloyd Baker.
Enabling easier information sharing between different health and care organisations in a region can have big benefits for patient safety and quality of care.
In Hertfordshire, a new IT portal will let GPs view information and data about children deemed ‘at risk’ by social workers.
Lloyd Baker, the chief information officer for the Commissioning Support Unit that covers the region, told us: “It’s about helping GPs and supporting the ‘hunch’. If a GP just has a feeling [that something is wrong], they can very quickly look up the data and see what a child’s A&E attendance has been like, and what the community feeling is on this child and use that for decision support. The more we do with the product, the more we connect into it and the richer the data, the benefits will start to take off. As we get a critical mass of data in the portal, they’ll start to really see the benefits.”
Explaining more about the ways the portal technology could be expanded, he told NHE: “I always had in my mind that a portal infrastructure across Hertfordshire would be a real key initiative and innovation platform for healthcare in this area.
“I got backing from the CCGs to look at how much this would cost and put together some options, and then it just so happened that one of our acute trusts [West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust] went down the same route.”
Both that trust and the CSU were looking to use technology supplied by Harris Healthcare. “It was a natural progression,” Baker said. “I was looking at the same product, so therefore we could get immediate synergies by connecting the two instances of the portal together across primary care and acute. We have also discussed it with our other main acute provider, our community trust, and mental health – they are all really interested in it, for different strategic reasons: some of them around joined-up care and pathways which is the obvious one, but also about improving the relationship between the provider and the commissioner.”
Baker explained that proving the safeguarding portal a success will be a good way to demonstrate the potential wider benefits. “We have already had stakeholders brought into it and clinically pushing it through – once they’ve done that successfully, we can demonstrate the benefits of it and use that as a building block.”
NHE asked Baker what feedback there had been from GPs and other interested parties so far. He explained: “The GPs who are on the board or who have already got an interest in or are stakeholders in the work we do are all very keen and excited about the portal, irrespective of who the provider is or how it is put together.
“I think the key breakthrough for them would be the safeguarding data and looking at adults as well as children in the future, and also getting live acute data on their patients as they travel through the system, so they can make more agile decisions about the care they are getting. They can ask whether they are getting the right care or if they want to pull them out of hospital, for example.
“There’s real buy-in for it and my aim was to do something small and achievable that was probably 100 times more effective than [something with] a £50,000 business case that then still delivers nothing. We’ve tried to do something real.”
He admitted that the information governance (IG) side of this project has been “extremely complex” and the “biggest barrier”, despite the default position that data on the children can be shared when it is in their best interest. “I’m under no illusions that [IG] is going to be the most difficult nut to crack. The approach will be looking at utilising smartcards within health and trying to do something around legitimate relationship governance across the other agencies if we go wider, but it’s going to be huge. The one good thing we’ve got is a very strong IG and clinical governance and clinical safety support for this piece of work.”
The work is starting this summer with 100 GPs, after which a review will be conducted to ensure the portal is worth rolling out to the full GP population across 126 practices.