Orion Health has worked with the Canadian province of Alberta for over twenty years. In this video, Chris Hobson, Chief Medical Officer at Orion Health, describes the region’s journey with its shared care record, including community information integration, e-referrals, and clinical engagement.

What can the UK learn from the Alberta Shared Care Record?

We’ve been working with Alberta for between 20 to 23 years.  

Alberta’s initial request was to create a single view to help the clinicians. So, if they wanted to understand their patients, they could see the data. I think we were fortunate that the clinicians there are very motivated, and right from the start, they saw this as an essential tool to doing their job.  

Key outcomes, so number one, was the shared record, providing that we’ve done some other really interesting things. So, in terms of in the UK, it’s called GP connect, and in Alberta, they call it Community Information integration, c2i, and so that takes data from the GP systems and presents it in our shared care record. We worked with six vendors, came up with 120 data elements, they all agreed to send those data elements after the patient’s been seen and there you can see it in the clinical record, along with the hospital data. 

Alberta is a really rich tool, Alberta Netcare now connects almost everything that moves in the province so another piece that’s been very successful there is we co-developed an electronic referral system. So, from a GP perspective, I’ve sent a referral for you to Calgary Foothills Hospital, I know immediately that when the referral has been received, when the referral has been actioned and what the action is, I can see all that in Netcare. So that’s been really successful, and it integrates every referral from the community to the hospital for every condition in Alberta. 

So, the lessons from Alberta that can be applied in the UK are numerous. For example, just in terms of clinician adoption, so every 3 months or so, the clinicians would see something new in Netcare. So, we’d send a notice out to the clinicians and say as of June you can now see immunisations in Netcare and what that does, it brings the clinicians along because they can feel that the thing isn’t evolving and improving, It’s not just a static piece. 

Alberta was really our first very large, shared record and the fact that it’s continued for so long is obviously really gratifying and we’ve used it and shown it to people from all over the world in terms of when they’re looking at how to do theirs. So, as Orion Health we’ve taken on the Shared Care Record in Ontario which is 15 million people and in Saudi Arabia which is nearly 40 million people. So you can do these things, but I actually like the kind of size that we have with the Shared Care Records in the UK and the other thing I really like about the way it’s being done in the UK is that clinicians are very much at the table in terms of making sensible decisions around the use of all this data. So, I’m very optimistic.  

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