Rotherham Council and its local primary care trust are
consolidating their systems on a single network three years after
first deciding to share information.
The metropolitan borough council and the health trust decided
that moving to a single network was the logical next step, after
giving key employees access to patient and client information held
on their respective systems.
Named employees at both the health trust and the council's
Children and Young People's Service use smart tokens to access
patient and client data. The tokens generate passwords which change
every eight seconds to improve the system's security.
Work started on an application that could access both agencies'
systems in 2003 after the primary care trust won approval from the
NHS Information Authority to share patient information.
Senior council and trust managers had talked about information
sharing since 1996. The talks initially came to nothing because
both sets of managers thought that the NHS Information Authority
would block any attempt to share patient data with a non-NHS
agency.
The information-sharing application was developed by RBT, a
joint venture company between the council and BT, which runs the
council's IT. The trust wrote the business case for the application
with input from the council and RBT.
Andrew Clayton, the trust's assistant IT director, said, "We
came up with an application to run over a virtual private network.
There were one or two hitches along the way, but it is now up and
running and working effectively."
The application was first used by the accident and emergency
department of Rotherham District General Hospital. It replaced a
paper-based child protection register that was not being kept
properly up to date.
Sue Wilson, the performance, information and quality manager for
Rotherham's Children and Young People's Service, said, "There were
some setbacks along the way - mainly to do with security - and some
people did raise eyebrows on both sides about information from one
organisation being available to another. But the practitioners were
enthusiastic about it because they could see the benefits."
More information:
Rotherham council
Rotherham primary care trust
NHS Programme for IT
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