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Patient’s current and historical records, sourced across multiple clinical IT systems, can now be accessed via a new web-based solution called CareInform.
Developed by Stalis, a provider of ‘end to end’ data and resource management solutions, it offers users across all health and social care settings a complete long-term view of a patient’s health conditions and treatments based on a single integrated repository.
As pressure to transform NHS patient services continues, CareInform is ideally placed to help local health organisations achieve the Department of Health’s (DH) Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention (QIPP) targets. Plus CareInform can meet the needs of the newly unveiled NHS mandate which advocates ‘that all patients should have an integrated electronic record of their care that can follow them to any part of the NHS or social care system, by 2015’.
Supporting these objectives, the CareInform solution means that information from social, primary and acute care can be intuitively linked and integrated enabling healthcare professionals to access accurate historic and current patient data quickly and easily from any site location, or compatible mobile tablet/phone. By making information more accessible and of better quality, this allows more informed decision-making leading to improved treatment and diagnosis, especially for patients with ongoing health problems.
By facilitating the integration of care, CareInform also has the capability of extending access and involving patients, therefore empowering them to make decisions on their own healthcare, leading to improvements in quality of data, attendance and outcomes.
Developed as a real-time patient-centric system, CareInform can pull information from any type of clinical or administrative system to create a single longitudinal patient record. This again supports another DH initiative, the ‘Information Strategy’, which includes a key ambition to deliver ‘joined up’ care by enabling healthcare providers and commissioners to share information electronically.
By supporting these objectives CareInform can help to minimise gaps and delays in treatment pathways, join up services and improve the patient experience.
Christine Whitehouse, managing director at Stalis said: “We’ve spoken with Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and discovered they want a way of intelligently linking data from different systems into one easy-to-use place, to save clinical and administrative time, whilst providing better quality of information. And it is by listening that we have developed CareInform to deliver against these needs.
“A fully informed clinician armed with instant access to a patient record, and a comprehensive view of a patient’s history across other healthcare settings along the care pathway, will be more empowered to make the most appropriate treatment decision. This can only improve health outcomes and lead to a safer, more efficient and effective health service, which CareInform can help to achieve.
“Our approach has always been to improve the quality of information available and, ultimately, helping to improve patient care. With CareInform, users are provided with a standardised overview of the full continuum of care, based on our tried and tested CareXML® platform. This means that our solution has been designed to be easily integrated with established systems eliminating the need to ‘rip and replace’, therefore protecting existing investments.”
The strength of CareInform is based on the fact it is supported by the robust and secure CareXML® platform which has been developed over the past 10 years to provide a well-established Integrated Patient Record (IPR) system. Stalis has been successful in implementing these systems in many trusts including Dudley and Walsall Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust.
