Torbay builds shared record on CRM

Beach huts in Torbay

Torbay Care Trust has signed a £3.8m, five-year contract to develop an integrated community record with New Zealand company Simpl.

The system will provide trust staff with office-based and remote offline access, allowing them to view, update and monitor client records from anywhere at any time.

Community-based staff such as district nurses will access it via tablet PC or smartphone.

Torbay Care Trust chief operating officer, Mandy Seymour, said it chose Simpl to deliver its Single Community Care Record or SCCR because of its commitment to working with clients.

A number of companies expressed interest in the contract, but none had provided a system with the level of integration needed, putting this development at the “cutting edge” of delivery of integrated care records, she said.

The trust, which provides health and social care services in Torbay and southern Devon, is estimating efficiency savings of 10-20% by the end of the contract, as a result of staff needing to make fewer trips and spending less time transcribing records.

The savings would help the trust to support the area's increasingly elderly population, while dealing with a restricted budget, she added.

During the initial six-week period of the contract, trust staff are working with developers to prioritise an implementation plan for the SCCR.

“It’s absolutely our number one priority because we think it’s absolutely fundamental to our business,” Seymour said.

“We feel having an integrated IT solution will take us that next step further forward in being able to deliver high quality care to the people we support.”

Simpl UK EMEA regional director Paul Malcolm said the level of integration between health and social care at Torbay Care Trust was unique.

However, he said Simpl was experienced at working with multiple healthcare organisations in New Zealand, where care tends to be more integrated.

The company hopes the Torbay deal will act as a springboard to getting more contracts in Britain.

“We have a firm belief that the integration of health and social care will be on lots of agendas over the coming years and we are delighted to be working with [Torbay] as the vanguards to show what we can deliver,” Malcolm said.

The SCCR will be built using Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The intention is that it will eventually replace the trust’s existing care record system, and will integrate with third party systems.

Malcolms said CRM was a “fantastic solution” for sharing information collaboratively between multi-disciplinary teams and the offline capabilities of CRM were key to the development.

Simpl’s public sector CRM partner, Optevia, will configure Microsoft Dynamics to include the use of third-party tools to make sure the SCCR will render correctly on mobile devices.

It will also create a common set of CRM forms that all staff can use for obtaining information from patients. Following deployment, Simpl UK will also provide 24/7 help desk support over a five-year period.