Individual Health Record extended to acute care

02 Sep 2008

Informing Healthcare has announced that the Individual Health Record has been used for the first time in acute care.

Staff at the Medical Assessment Unit of the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport have been given access to the IHR, which is drawn from GP records and contains key details about a patient’s medical history.

The move follows the successful introduction of the IHR to Gwent’s out of hours service. Informing Healthcare claims it has already halved the time that staff at the MAU spend making calls to GPs to find out about diagnoses and medication.

Farzana Mohammed, pharmacist independent prescriber on the unit, said: “We often phone GPs to get the information we need. However, on a bank holiday or weekend, it is not always possible to reach them. The IHR can provide us with that critical information.

“This also frees time for staff in the MAU and at the GP practice and GP telephone lines are kept free for patients.”

The Individual Health Record is one of the big national projects being undertaken by Informing Healthcare. Following the Gwent pilot, it is being rolled out to out of hours services in Gwynedd, Anglesey, Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion, taking the total number of patients covered to more than 800,000.

Eventually, the aim is to roll out the IHR to all unscheduled care settings, including assessment units and accident and emergency units. Informing Healthcare stresses that out of hours staff must always ask the patient’s permission to view their record.

Director Gwyn Thomas recently told E-Health Insider that Informing Healthcare had been talking to NHS Connecting for Health about its consent model, which has some similarities with the “consent to view” model recommended by Patricia Greenhalgh following her study of the roll out of the NHS Summary Care Record in England.

Lyn Whitfield

Reader's Comments

Good approach

03 Sep 08 09:15

But should not be sold as a breakthrough. Go have a look at what they have been doing in Hampshire for some time.

Note this is nothing against the project which is rightly reported as a success (I hope) but too often the e-health insider is reporting things as pioneering when sometimes they aren't. This project in my view should be given high profile but maybe not in the way posted. Case in point, the Marsden article on remote access. Most people have been doing that for ages.

(post edited by EHI)

and in Scotland

Peter.Curry@nhs.net

05 Sep 08 00:26

The NHS in Scotland has had the Emergence Care summary up and running NATIONALLY for some considerable time now. Wales should be congratulated for implementing something sensible but it is not new.