Lewisham Council is piloting electronic records so that
departments can share information about the people who use multiple
local authority services.
The London borough council's older adults and hospital teams
provide services to the same people, but they work in different
locations and have built up two different sets of social care
records.
The adoption services team at Lewisham Council is also piloting
social care records that run on an underlying electronic document
management system.
The council wants to use electronic records as its means of
storing people's social care information for the long term.
Adoption services is also piloting electronic records because it
needs to share information securely between social workers and
respond quickly to requests for information from clients.
In March 2005, the council proved that electronic social care
records could be transferred securely across its IT infrastructure
and integrated with its transactional systems. The standalone care
records technology was designed, built, tested and delivered by the
end of last year.
The three departments have been using the electronic social care
record pilots to discover how sharing client information can
improve business processes.
Lewisham Council said, "The electronic social care record has
provided a proven infrastructure that is ready for other parts of
the council to exploit. There is a toolkit of facilities that is
available for departments to apply to other applications."
The toolkit is also available to other councils as a free
download.
Both social workers and the council's back-office support staff
have been able to find relevant documents more speedily.
The council said, "Documents are available immediately,
improving the assessment process and reducing potential delays.
This will improve performance in some areas, such as when a service
user can only be moved from hospital care to discharge if the
receiving team has the people and documents in place to do so."
Lewisham's older adults team is also trialling a system to
capture information using mobile devices.
Social workers still have to manually re-enter data collected
using the mobile devices because there is no integration between
the mobile application and the electronic social care record.
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