Shared Care Record launches across Norfolk and Waveney
A single source of patient information
The new Norfolk and Waveney Shared Care Record makes a person’s most important health and social care records visible to frontline staff, at the point of care. It empowers 30,000 staff across hospitals and community sites to make informed decisions about an individual’s care, using the most up to date information at their fingertips.
One of the key aims of the Norfolk and Waveney Integrated Care Board (the ICB) was for people to tell their story only once, allowing GPs, nurses, consultants, social and mental health workers and other professionals to provide better coordinated care for 1.1 million people across the region. This helps prevent avoidable illness, improve outcomes and reduce health inequalities.
Why ReStart?
ReStart was selected by the ICB to provide interoperability expertise during the first two phases of the Shared Care Record deployment integrating mental health data from Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT) in March 2023, followed in November by the sharing of patient data from three acute trusts, James Paget University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (JPUH), The Queen Elizabeth Hospital Kings Lynn NHS Trust (QEH) and Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (NNUH). This latter stage also included the provision of documents from urgent care provider IC24 (Integrated Care 24), to the new Shared Care Record.
Stacey Cairns, Digital Project Manager, Norfolk and Waveney ICB explains:
“With ReStart’s existing Acute relationships, they were able to provide a lot of intelligence, as well as acting as the vehicle to get the integrations into place and support that flow of information for us. ReStart has saved the day for us on more than a few occasions.”
The interoperability is underpinned by a dedicated central integration engine (the CIE) powered by Mirth Connect (NextGen Healthcare) and deployed by ReStart. The CIE is configured for high availability, to maintain critical performance for all the real-time data feeds flowing from health and care providers to the Shared Care Record.
As part of the solution, ReStart helped each trust to prepare multiple backloads of historic data types (patient demographics, Discharge Summaries, ePrescribing etc) to populate the Shared Care Record at launch. This involved careful manipulation of the data flows to ensure that the integrity of the patient journey within each healthcare setting was maintained, bringing messages in sync with real-time events. Over 10 million messages were successfully extracted from the individual trusts, queued in the CIE, before releasing securely to the Shared Care Record.
All of this was made possible by ReStart’s solid partnerships with all three acutes, NSFT and Shared Care Record supplier, InterSystems. The collaboration ensured that every single interface was authenticated and encrypted (TLS 1.2), rigorously tested, and IG approved, at every stage, with no impact on existing services.
Stacey further comments:
“ReStart give us assurance about our data, making sure it is accurately labelled and available for InterSystems so they can display it correctly, which makes our lives so much easier. It always feels like they are one of the team. They take their time with our partner organisations, during daily and sometimes nightly meetings. The ReStart team are so knowledgeable and calm, that you can be sure everything is going to be absolutely fine.”
Proactive Integration Support
The interoperability is supported 24/7 with ReStart’s IMX RAM (ReStart Alert Monitor). IMX RAM monitors all the clinical interactions across each individual integration engine at NNUH, JPUH, QEH and NSFT, and also supports custom alerting in the CIE. Through proactive monitoring of heartbeats, message queues and more. ReStart maintains the ongoing health and performance of every organisation.
Future Plans
With a successful go-live in February 2024, the Shared Care Record is now live and being accessed by all partner organisations across health and social care, primary, secondary, mental health, out of hours, social care and community services. The future for Norfolk and Waveney ICB’s digital landscape is to maintain a focus on improving the quality of the data in the Shared Care Record, making sure that access is secure and robust, that standards are upheld with different data items, and also making sure that the architecture sitting behind it is standardised on a national level.
More information
To learn more about ReStart please visit our integration services page, alternatively please get in touch and one of our team will be happy to show you more.
