Summary Care Records
Finally something about IT, I was getting a bit concerned.
E-Health Insider carries news of guidance issued to the SHA’s 
about the detail of the Summary Care Record Service i.e. the Spine.
The gist is that
Patients can choose to dissent from data sharing, in which case a patient’s summary record will be restricted to the authoring GP only.
If patients do not opt-out an initial text based summary of their medications, allergies and adverse reactions will be uploaded to the spine.
After the upload patients have two options. They can choose to remove some items from their summary record, known as ‘tailoring’ and done by the clinician, or they can send a blank summary update which includes demographic information only and a message that the patient has chosen not to have a summary record.
So patients can consent to sharing their summary, dissent from sharing but still have the information uploaded in case they change their minds or dissent from sharing and have no summary uploaded.
I wonder why it took so long to get to this stage, these principles are the ones that should have been applied from the start. Though there is still the opt-in v/s opt-out issue.
The first wave of the early adopter programme will begin in the first quarter of 2007/8 with a small number of practices in one PCT, followed by roll out to more practices in that PCT and the trial of the programme in a second PCT. In the last two quarters of the year second wave practices will go live with the SCR. Access to the SCR via Healthspace will be available from May or June 2007.
But considering that the initial consultation with patients to gain consent for data sharing is currently taking 2 hours, I wonder how this will work in practice. Not to mention the issue of exclusion -
“Dr Hannan admits the system isn’t for everyone, though. He has many patients from the Bengali population - and none of them have so far come forward for internet access to their records.”
And there still is no clarity about the governance arrangements & the resources available to the Caldicott Guardians or others taking on the governance role.
There is also the Guidance from the DH on preparing local IM&T plans. I struggled to find guidance on obtaining actual clinical input into these plans.
Also, some detail previously released by CfH about Sealed Envelopes and the philosophy behind them .
See the new Private Eye dated 2 March - 15 March for a ripping yarn on the tribulations surrounding the NHS IT programme. The article is not available online but I hope to do something about that soon. The image posted below is blurred on purpose to avoid copyright issues.
March 15th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
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