A hospital trust in Wirral headed by a former NHS IT
chief is forging ahead with a new birth-to-death, community-wide
electronic health record that it says is years ahead of plans for a
national patient records system.
The implementation reflects much of the thinking that underpins the
government's plans for a national database of medical records,
called the Care Records Service, which is at the heart of the
£2.3bn national programme for IT (NPfIT). Executives from the
Wirral Hospital NHS Trust and NPfIT officials have been exchanging
ideas, experiences and lessons learned.
Frank Burns, the Wirral trust's chief executive, was head of NHS
information management and technology in the late 1990s. He was
principal author of Information for Health, the information
strategy for the NHS, published in 1998. This provided many of the
objectives for the national programme.
The Information for Health strategy set targets for the
introduction of local e-health records by 2007. "The Wirral health
community has always been committed to the delivery of this
target," said the trust. It acknowledged that its system would
"eventually be subsumed" into the national Care Records
Service.
But Wirral's implementation has run into resistance from about 10%
of GP surgeries, which have not yet joined the scheme because of
concerns about the confidentiality of data. If a similar percentage
refused to join the national care records service, it would mean
that thousands of GPs would decline to allow their patient records
to be transferred to the central database, run by BT.
A spokesman for Wirral Hospital NHS Trust said most of the doctors
in practices which have not signed up to the local scheme are
"concerned that confidentiality issues outweigh the clinical
benefits of sharing data".
He added, "The information governance issues of the electronic
health record have been, and still are, the hardest part of a
joined-up record. The technical side is simple in comparison."
Getting the message out to patients
Wirral Hospital NHS Trust has run a large-scale publicity
campaign, including a leaflet drop to every household in its area,
which explains what it means to have an electronic health
record.
Hospitals outside the area will feed summary data into Wirral's
health records system via the NHS' national clearing service. Only
13 of 330,000 people have decided to opt out of the scheme.
Wirral lights the way to electronic records>>
