The first health and social care link goes live
System C Healthcare, Microsoft, Orion Health and Liquidlogic have joined forces to produce the first health and social care link under NHS Connecting for Health's (CfH) new standards for systems integration.
This link is an important step in the national drive to improve collaboration between healthcare providers and social services teams.
The solution takes a patient's discharge summary created on System C's Medway PAS/EPR system and sends it within an electronic message to Liquidlogic's PROTOCOL Integrated Adults' System (IAS) via the Orion Rhapsody Integration Engine.
Microsoft's Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator (CDSA) for Microsoft Office®, running inside Medway, renders discharge information and supports the population of additional data items (such as medications) and encoding of clinical terms, before generating the required message.
The discharge summary is based on guidelines from the Royal College of Physicians and contains details of a patient's admission, presenting complaints, procedures undergone, discharge prescription, follow-up notes and so on.
"Under a paper-based system, it can take up to 2 or 3 weeks for the information to be transmitted, by which time a patient could have undergone 3 episodes of care in the community without the care provider necessarily having a clear picture of their status," said Denise Harrison, Sales and Marketing Director at Liquidlogic. "This solution will improve this significantly."