The King’s Fund

On July the 6th 2016, Camden Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and Orion Health held a well-attended breakfast briefing on the Camden Integrated Digital Record (CIDR) at The King’s Fund Digital Health and Care Congress in London.

Orion Health were headline sponsors of this event held in London. James Ormonde, Sales Director for England at Orion Health opened this breakfast briefing with a personal account of a recent hospital stay which highlighted the impact that groundbreaking integration projects such as CIDR can have on patients. He introduced the speakers from Camden CCG, Dr Neel Gupta, GP Representative and Hasib Aftab, Head of IT & Systems.

Camden CCG incorporates three acute hospitals, a community provider, mental health provider, GP practices and social care within its footprint. Hasib Aftab described the objectives of CIDR, a record procured from Orion Health to facilitate the sharing of and access to data to improve patient outcomes:

  • Connecting the patient (once) and motivating them to use digital channels
  • Support for workflows that cross communities
  • Locating and sharing data
  • Securing shared infrastructure (where required)
  • Development of standards and resolution of complex problems
  • Managing implementation and adoption of standards to support the above
  • CIDR is a read-only portal incorporating both health and social care information. Dr Neel Gupta commented on the inclusion of social care data, “it’s pleasing as those people likely to benefit most are those with the most complex need, who tend to be under multiple agencies and tend to fall between the cracks.”

Dr Gupta described some of the key challenges of the project within three categories, technical, information governance and relationship management, citing relationship management as the most crucial to success. He believes that with a ‘shared will,’ created by effective relationship management, the other challenges can be overcome.

On information governance, Dr Gupta said, “it’s a balance between protecting people’s data but also trying not to create something that’s so heavy handed that you restrict access or the data included in a way that renders the system no longer appealing or useful.’ The vast majority of patients have been happy to consent to their data being shared. Dr Gupta shared some of the methods that Camden CCG have employed to communicate and engage with residents. 

Dr Gupta described how clinical adoption of CIDR was enabled by including single sign-on with the GP system in the scope of the project to ensure GPs did not have to log in to different systems. Of the c. 1,200 GPs in the geography, 800-1,000 were issued licenses within weeks. Screen shots of the GP record were shared in the session as well as those of a patient summary, care plan and social care record.

Dr Gupta ended by saying that whilst Camden CCG are pleased with and proud of what they’ve achieved to date, the future is exciting. Developments in CIDR’s roadmap include additional data feeds, more single sign-ons with other systems, clinical workflows, mobile working and a patient portal. 

*** 

Watch the video recording of the breakfast briefing now to find out more.