Birmingham develops PHR

Tags: Birmingham PHRs

15 Jun 2010

The University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust is preparing to provide patients with access to their medical information via a new personal health record.

The portal, which will be developed in-house and piloted towards the end of the year, will allow patients to access their appointments and details of medications and results. It will also enable them to interact with other patients via sites such as Facebook.

Daniel Ray, director of informatics and patient administration, told E-Health Insider: “The initiative came about after we followed a patient who had a liver transplant. She had a number of different addresses but every time information was sent to her it was only sent to one address.

“In an ideal world, she would be able to log onto the internet to access the information she needs and also put any queries she has to the consultant remotely.”

The portal, which will initially be piloted with 12 liver transplant patients, is expected to cost around £150,000. It could eventually serve 5,000-8,000 patients across different specialities.

Ray added: “We’re being very careful about which patients we open it up to. We will carry out the pilot and then start providing access to people with longer term conditions such as diabetes. But we really are going to have to reach banking levels of security before any of that.

“At the moment, we’re getting the core underlying infrastructure sorted and getting in third parties such as HBOS to focus on security. We also have to get lawyers involved so that patients are fully informed.”

The trust has already secured the funding required from its charities, after highlighting the benefits to patients. The funding will cover the cost of a developer for 6-12 months, security consultancy and certificate, and hardware.

A paper will be submitted to the chief executive and the board to outline any risks associated with the project.

“These are mainly around logging-in risks," said Ray. "If it is too complex to log-in, people will not want to use it. But if it is too easy, then it could get hacked. So it’s particularly important to get that balance.

“There also needs to be some more work around what happens if results are abnormal, do we hide those results from a patient temporarily and how we can ensure that the patient gets sufficient support."

Opinion and analysis: E-Health Insider reporter Sarah Bruce recently visited Birmingham to see how the new Queen Elizabeth Hospital will be using IT. Read her feature, Moving on up.

Sarah Bruce

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Readers Comments

Reinventing the wheel

16 Jun 10 10:34

This all sounds like a Summary Care Record when used with HealthSpace (access to health records, secure communication with clinical staff, targeted health information, ability to update demographics). Still, £150,000 isn’t all that much in these troubled times and they will have a brand new wheel.

Wonderful

17 Jun 10 21:28

Well done Daniel Ray & team at UHB

It just goes to show what can be achieve when clinical IT projects are managed correctly - please apply for lessons DH & CfH who fail repeatedly and totally ignore these great projects that occur around the country

The secret? Develop skills in house and listen to your staff who often have a great amount of technical knowledge & engage clincians from the start. Don't waste millions on consultants and external firms as the NHS seems to do without a care.

Hospitals such as UHB have been innovating with e-prescribing, electronic records etc. for years yet all of this is ignored by central bodies - rather than spread things that work, they insist on developing and imposing systems that are years behind.

Benefits

danish.jafri@medway.nhs.uk

21 Jun 10 08:29

The benefits of SCR or Electronically be able to view your records is what we need and what we must have, call it SCR, HealthVault or PHR all serve the same purpose.

I must agree, people at Birmingham are thinking at the next level which is great. I was shock to see the report that SCR seeks few benefits.

Daniel Ray is for sure a man with a vision, lets hope the vision stays focused- Best of luck and congrtaz for thinking out of the box.

Possible to take cues from Renal Patient View

21 Jun 10 13:49

Exposing appropriate information for patients that exists in hospital systems is ideal in many (probably not all) cases.

Whilst the first comment to be posted in response to this story suggests that the initiative is a re-invention of the SCR and Healthspace wheel, IMO the two approaches bear no comparison. - - not sure a fuller explanation is needed here but I'd be happy to offer one if anyone disagrees;-)

One comparison with the proposed approach by Birmingham to provide online info to liver transplant patients however, is the availability of a web solution 'Renal Patient View' across the majority of the UK (not just England) which has been developed by the RIXG (Renal Information Exchange Group) providing a web portal from which renal patients can access extensive information pertaining to their treatment including;

- primary diagnosis and treatment - results of test results carried out within the Renal Unit by date - prescribed medicines by date - Moderated Patient forum - feedback and contact forms

all with links to relevant and trusted health information

see - http://tinyurl.com/2w93lju

Demo (test patient) login credentials are provided on the Renal Patient View portal which allows interested parties to understand the usefulness of this information. see - www.renalpatientview.org/

I believe there are over 12,000 users (registered) of Renal Patient View (has been available for 5 years or so) although I'm not aware of what the frequency of use by users is.

If Birmingham have identified an opportunity for patients who are awaiting liver transplants or are being cared for following transplants then this could also form the basis of national work in much the same way as the Renal Patient View solution supports Renal patients nationally.

The use of a moderated 'user forum' within RPV should also be noted - bringing together users within a managed community could well be more preferable than using Facebook which has some obvious pitfalls associated with it.

Glen Griffiths (no involvement with RIXG or Renal Patient View)