Care workers will be able to access records via a single view on
screen
Croydon Primary Care Trust and Croydon Council's social services
department are developing a multi-agency information sharing system
to access residents' health and social care information via a
single view on their screens.
The organisations are building the system using VisionWare's
Multivue Identification Server, a person and property indexing tool
based on Microsoft .net.
The first phase of the project is to unify data to support the
single assessment process for older people. The technology will
then be extended to other multi-agency information sharing
initiatives such as supporting integrated mental health teams and
creating an electronic social care record.
Mark Grollett, information services manager at Croydon social
services, said his agency had 17 partner agencies with which it
needed to share information, including the health service, police,
probation service and other council departments.
"Initially, Multivue is enabling us to integrate data between
Croydon Primary Care Trust and social services databases, but the
flexible architecture of Multivue will enable us to integrate
additional disparate systems in the future using the same
technology framework," said Grollett.
The first step in the process was for the trust and social services
to create a common index of residents and share core information
from their respective systems. In April, 280,000 records from the
trust and 150,000 records from social services were fed into
Multivue and from this 42,000 matches were achieved.
Manual validation and data cleansing is now being used for the
remaining records, focusing only on those residents who have had
contact with either organisation in the past three years.
John Toole, head of health informatics at Croydon Primary Care
Trust, said, "A common person index is a pre-requisite for any
multi-agency information-sharing initiative. Before you can develop
joint care plans or assessments, you must be certain that you are
sharing information about the same person.
"Often, a person can be identified in different ways in different
systems, including different ways of spelling the name or multiple
addresses for one individual. This makes it virtually impossible to
confidently share information."
Now that a common means of identification has been achieved , the
trust and social services have started phase two of the project: to
agree what level of information needs to be shared to support the
delivery of integrated care.
When the data sharing protocols have been developed, Multivue will
provide a unified view of a resident's details from the back-office
systems. Information will be extracted from the two feeder
applications using Microsoft's Biztalk Server, and Multivue will be
used to create a shared repository of integrated records based on
the common person index.
Health and social care practitioners will access the repository via
a web browser, with record sharing only authorised if explicit
consent has been given by the patient.