Warrington & Halton Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust have successfully gone live with the integration of their EPR with NHS Digital’s GP Connect products. Clinicians using Dedalus’ EPR can now see key clinical information from GP systems in the hospital’s EPR at the point of care.
Supporting the medicines reconciliation process, clinical teams at the Trust can now securely access GP medication and allergy records. Clinicians at the Trust can view and import a patient’s current medication status. All staff with the relevant access involved in a patient’s care now have additional information upon which to base ongoing treatment decisions.
GP Connect, part of the wider NHS Digital interoperability strategy, provides doctors, nurses, and pharmacy staff with access to key clinical information held within GP records such as current medications and allergy status. It allows authorised clinical staff to share and view GP practice clinical information and data between IT systems, quickly and efficiently. The service makes patient medical information available to all appropriate clinicians when and where they need it to support direct patient care, leading to improvements in both care and outcomes. The service provides more secure information transfer using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), removing the need to use less secure methods such as email or fax.
Peter Abraham, Lead Pharmacist for EPMA, Homecare, Medicines Management and Ophthalmology at Warrington and Halton Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said: “Integrating GP Connect with Dedalus’ EPR has benefits for staff and patients, improving decisions and saving time. We can obtain and validate medication and allergy data from GP Connect for adding to a patient record in the EPR, in the knowledge that the data is consistent and secure.”
Colin Henderson, Managing Director, UK, and Ireland, Dedalus, said: “The Trust is leading the way in the integration of GP Connect to their EPR. More integrated ways of working across health and care are reliant on the ability of IT systems to be interoperable to enable care professionals and patients to better manage care, Warrington and Halton are embracing this through GP Connect.”