Salford PCT - using interoperability to improve patient care

April 2004: Salford PCT

Salford PCT has made huge advancements in its care for patients with diabetes.

Using EMIS Open, key patient information is transferred from GPs' clinical systems into a central data repository, held by Salford PCT. Other healthcare systems are also providing data, building up a complete patient record spanning primary and secondary care.

This allows Salford PCT to be confident that they have good standards of data recording, and have in place an underlying infrastructure of capturing patient health information.

EMIS Open uses National Programme for IT (NPfIT) messages to transfer vital recorded patient data to a central repository, using the world industry standard for health IT systems, HL7-v3. It is an instant process, which updates records in real time: the average time from filing a record to completed transmission is 5 seconds. This facilitates the sharing of data along the care pathway, in line with the NHS Care Record Service.

Supporting the NHS care record service

EMIS Open can support any disease data set and is suitable for local chronic disease registers and shared disease specific electronic records, such as diabetes in Salford. It can also be used for full patient record outputs to support PCT EPRs (electronic patient records) and for subsets of patient medical records for example in research trials.

Dr David Stables, Medical Director, EMIS, said "As part of our commitment to the NPfIT we welcome the opportunity to move as fast as possible to adopt and implement its interoperability standards. This is the first of a suite of clinical messages we expect will link all our GP users to community and acute care providers across all specialties and disease topics."