The Care and Health Information Exchange is Hampshire’s shared care record. It moved to the Orion Health platform last year and is now focused on increasing the number of users. Katharine Guthrie, stakeholder engagement and benefits manager, told the UK and Ireland Customer Conference that the move meant using 18 years’ worth of data onto the new platform in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic; “so that was fun.” But it enabled CHIE to take Orion Health Discover, to find out more about who is logging on, and what information they are searching for.

What is Orion Health Discover?

Discover enables Orion Health customers to surface data and to analyse it. It can be used for clinical or administrative processes. In both cases, users log into their shared care record and then have SSO access to dashboards that can display information that they are interested in. Discover is a modular product: in addition to its core and dashboards, these can include clinical demographics and pathways, so it is Discover that powers functionality such as collaborative worklists. Discover can also be used to generate data for analysis and population health management.

CHIE is working with core and dashboards, and Katharine explained what its management team has been doing with them. “We did some regular meetings with [product manager] Bruce Horne and his colleagues, and we did some small things that made a big difference,” she said. “For example, we created some better charts to show who was logging in and what they were looking at. We introduced some search fields, so our BAU team could find and support individual users. We introduced some date and code searches.

“Now, we have a dashboard that is split into four sections. We still want to do more things, but we have some nice information to show our partners about how many people are viewing the record, which is trending upwards.”

How Discover is helping CHIE

Katharine said some of the detailed drill-down that Discover enables has helped her team to bust some popular myths. “We also have more information about when people are logging in,” she said. “We are always told that nobody uses the record out of hours, but in fact that is not true, and that will help our department look at whether we are supporting the record properly.

“And then we have drilled down to look at what our GPs are looking at. We are often told that GPs don’t want social care data: but that’s not true, either. It is one of our most used datasets.” It has also helped her team to confirm some long-held suspicions. “We have information about failed logons, and we have been able to see that the biggest spike is after school holidays, when people come back to work and forget their passwords.”

CHIE has recently rolled out access to care homes, working with Orion Health to implement multi-factor authentication to make sure that only authorised users are looking at patient information over the public internet. To support the roll out, Katharine said it has been looking at the information that care homes are interested in. “As you would expect, they are looking at medications and discharge information, so if Mrs Smith is heading towards them in an ambulance they can go onto CHIE and find out all about her.”

In future, she added, she wants even more detailed information, not least about who is using the record at the four, big acute hospitals in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, to encourage more people to benefit from the time savings that a shared care record can deliver. “At the moment, we can see the four main users, but we would like to split them out. Because usage is not a competition, but in Hampshire it sort of is because our four acutes all like to keep up with each other. So that will be one of our next developments.”