CSW awarded contract for Welsh Individual Health Record

Informing Healthcare, the NHS Wales IT agency, has awarded a three year contract to CSW Group Ltd to commence implementation of the Individual Health Record (IHR) in out-of-hours care in North West and South West Wales.

The service is scheduled to become available for the 390,000 patients by spring 2008. The areas covered by the Welsh IHR will be Gwynedd and Anglesey in North West Wales and Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion in South West Wales.

Patient safety and quality of care will be improved with the IHR as it allows patient information held on GP practice computer systems to be viewed by medical staff in the local out-of-hours service.

Awarded before Christmas, the contract follows CSW winning a 2004 contract to develop a Technical Proof of Concept (TPoC) for an Integrated Electronic Health Record in the NHS in Wales for use in out-of-hours care.

The TPoC contract was awarded to provide the first stage in implementing the Welsh NHS IT strategy, and informed the development of a full business case for the IHR project and subsequent procurement.

This implementation builds on the successful use of the Individual Health Record in out-of-hours care in the Gwent health community.

The project is in line with both Informing Healthcare's strategy of incremental deployment of service improvements and the Welsh Assembly Government's Delivering Emergency Care Services (DECS) strategy.

Jon Hoeksma