Delivering the national strategy in primary care: northern
Lincolnshire’s shared-records system
Trevor Wright looks back at the start of a large-scale
project to instate a communal patient-centred clinical information
system for 43 GP practices in two primary care trusts in northern
Lincolnshire.
keywords: strategy
implementation, integrated care records, primary care, information
systems design.
abstract
The delivery of shared-record solutions poses some significant
challenges for primary care trusts and other healthcare trusts
across the country. Northern Lincolnshire was one of the first
healthcare communities to tackle this issue when it installed a
single shared-records system for the majority of its 57 GP
practices. The design, which makes use of two secured intranets,
enables clinicians to access their patients’ records from a
central database, from anywhere at any time. Some 18 months later,
as the project nears completion, the author summarises the main
challenges associated with the implementation of this ‘new breed’
solution for the NHS and achievements to date. Training hundreds of
IT-naive users to work the system and migrating data to the shared
database were among the greatest challenges; ready acceptance by
primary care clinicians of the new ways of working has been one of
the main triumphs.
Br J Healthcare Comput Info Manage 2003; 20(3): 19–21.
|
