Published on: Thursday 2nd October, 2014

Advanced Health & Care (Advanced) is working with Herts Urgent Care to enable it to access real-time patient data from three different GP primary care  systems through Advanced's class-leading urgent and unscheduled patient management system, Adastra.

By connecting to Healthcare Gateway's Medical Interoperability Gateway (MIG) via Adastra, Herts Urgent Care GPs will benefit from having immediate visibility, 24 hours a day, of patient information. The information will include medical summaries, together with up-to-date details of medication from within the organisation's urgent care services.

Clinicians will be able to use this information to improve the care they offer to 620,000 patients in 60 GP practices across Hertfordshire.

Herts Urgent Care has been using Adastra in its Out-of-Hours services since 2007 and selected Advanced as its preferred MIG partner after using its Adastra 111 solution from 2012 to successfully manage over 370,000 NHS 111 calls from its main call centre in Welwyn Garden City.

11 GP practices in Hertfordshire are initially taking part in a pilot scheme lasting until March 2015 which aims to deliver approximately 240 Out-of-Hours patient consultations per week. 49 additional practices in Hertfordshire will then follow as part of a phased roll-out of the MIG.

Paul Gauld, Head of IT at Herts Urgent Care, says, "We have a longstanding relationship with Advanced Health & Care and had no hesitation in selecting them as our trusted MIG partner. By linking together three GP systems via Adastra we can now provide the clinicians that run our services with instant access to a deeper level of patient information which wasn't possible before.

"This access will assist them to increase efficiency and make better informed decisions to improve patient care and reduce the knock-on effect of unnecessary repeat admissions."

Clinicians, once they have obtained the patient's permission to view the record, will also be able to view details relating to historical surgical procedures, blood pressure examinations and test results to provide safer, more efficient care to patients.

Gauld adds, "By collaborating with Healthcare Gateway and other best-of-breed software providers, Advanced Health & Care is enabling us to participate in the sharing of vital clinical data to significantly enhance our service offering. As a result patients in Hertfordshire can be reassured that they will be dealing with clinicians who have a greater understanding of their needs to ensure they receive the best possible care experience from the outset."

Advanced has been a MIG partner since 2011 when Adastra received formal accreditation to work with Healthcare Gateway's MIG. Advanced has delivered many practical and robust information sharing solutions for integrated care such as the Summary Care Record, Special Patient Notes, End of Life care plans, real-time messaging of information, point-2-point integrations and other locally shared record programmes using a variety of technologies.

Jim Chase, Managing Director of Advanced Health & Care, comments, "Most health care communities see the advantages to patients and the NHS that flow from the integrated care agenda.

"We have worked with Healthcare Gateway on a number of projects. We can see that the MIG delivers many benefits by delivering a secure and flexible sharing and consent model alongside the open approach to technology thus solving many practical problems of appropriate access to information in a modern healthcare economy."

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