News
Adastra out-of-hours system integrated with NHS Spine and Summary
Care Record
8 July 2009
Adastra has announced that it has worked closely with NHS Connecting
for Health to achieve NHS Spine compliance for its its out-of-hours
system and this has been successfully tested by early adopter teams at
Bury & Rochdale Doctors on Call (BARDOC) and NHS Bolton.
Dr Darren J Mansfield, Clinical Lead for Urgent Care and Patient
Safety at NHS Bolton said, “We chose to upgrade our Adastra system to
the integrated version with Spine functionality because accessing
the Summary Care Record had been extremely clunky. Since the Adastra
implementation the hassle factor has gone and our Summary Care Record
hits have shot up from 200 per month to 200 per week.”
The Summary Care Record (SCR) is an electronic summary of key health
information. It holds limited essential information derived initially
from the patient’s GP record and includes details regarding medication,
adverse reactions and allergies. The Personal Demographic Service (PDS)
provides the gateway to accessing SCRs — a central index that contains
patient names, addresses, telephone numbers, registered practice and NHS
number of all registered patients in England.
Adastra has integrated the PDS look-up as part of the software’s case
entry function, allowing users to validate their patients’ demographic
details and obtain patients’ NHS numbers. The NHS number triggers the
system to offer authorised users access to their patients’ SCR’s with
the relevant smartcard in place.
Fazal Aslam, IT & Business Development Manager at BARDOC said, “Our
Call Handlers use the PDS search functionality to verify patient
demographics data and retrieve the patient NHS Number. We have had
positive feedback from practice managers in terms of improved data
quality they receive from us and with the addition of the patient NHS
Number being included they are finding it much easier to match the
patient Out-of-hours encounter report with their record held in general
practice.”
This valuable Adastra functionality represents a significant step in
the vision of the Next Stage Review set out by Lord Darzi to
improve the quality of the patient experience through the provision of a
co-ordinated approach between scheduled and unscheduled healthcare
teams.
Both BARDOC and NHS Bolton, who between them have created almost
200,000 SCRs for patients within their communities already, are leading
the way with the use of Adastra spine functionality and are starting to
reap the benefits.
Dr Mansfield went on, “We now encourage our clinicians to access the
SCR through Adastra as part of the consultation and it is fast becoming
the norm. Even with the limited SCR information that is available
currently, clinicians can already see details of medication and
allergies allowing them to make decisions that are much better
informed.”
Adastra’s solution includes an initial database cleansing exercise
matching via NHS number and amalgamating duplicate records. It also
handles the matter of ‘establishing that the clinician has a legitimate
relationship with the patient’ and ‘patient consent’ — providing a full
audit trail for the clinician’s records.
Dr Gillian Braunold, Clinical Director of the SCR and HealthSpace
Programme, told us, “The work Adastra has done in terms of improving
speed and ease of access to the SCR represents a gear change in SCR roll
out across the country. No project on this scale could ever happen
overnight, there is a learning curve for everyone involved. The SCR
initiative is making good, solid progress with over 328,000 SCRs
available and 16 PCTs actively involved in the roll out. The SCR has
arrived and it is only a matter of time before it is available across
the entire population.”
Jim Chase, Managing Director of Adastra Software Ltd, said, “Adastra
is extremely proud to be part of this project. This is very much in line
with our strategy to listen to our customers and support them by staying
at the forefront of technology for unscheduled and urgent care. It is
also in line with our promise to our customers to collaborate with IT
and content providers, to enable information sharing and contribute to
the NHS’ drive to connect patient journeys.”
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