Individual Health Record extended to acute care

Informing Healthcare has announced that the Individual Health Record has been used for the first time in acute care.

Staff at the Medical Assessment Unit of the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport have been given access to the IHR, which is drawn from GP records and contains key details about a patient’s medical history.

The move follows the successful introduction of the IHR to Gwent’s out of hours service. Informing Healthcare claims it has already halved the time that staff at the MAU spend making calls to GPs to find out about diagnoses and medication.

Farzana Mohammed, pharmacist independent prescriber on the unit, said: “We often phone GPs to get the information we need. However, on a bank holiday or weekend, it is not always possible to reach them. The IHR can provide us with that critical information.

“This also frees time for staff in the MAU and at the GP practice and GP telephone lines are kept free for patients.”

The Individual Health Record is one of the big national projects being undertaken by Informing Healthcare. Following the Gwent pilot, it is being rolled out to out of hours services in Gwynedd, Anglesey, Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion, taking the total number of patients covered to more than 800,000.

Eventually, the aim is to roll out the IHR to all unscheduled care settings, including assessment units and accident and emergency units. Informing Healthcare stresses that out of hours staff must always ask the patient’s permission to view their record.

Director Gwyn Thomas recently told E-Health Insider that Informing Healthcare had been talking to NHS Connecting for Health about its consent model, which has some similarities with the “consent to view” model recommended by Patricia Greenhalgh following her study of the roll out of the NHS Summary Care Record in England.