IDCR: A great new way to help clinicians via a single view of a patient’s complete medical history

Chris Brice catches us all up SynApps’ work to help NHS and local authorities’ better share key medical information

As many of you are aware, SynApps is one of the leading providers to the NHS of a very special and actually highly desirable solution called the Integrated Digital Care Record, the SynApps IDCR.

IDCR is a solution that encompasses everything that every NHS Trust, and an increasing number of local authorities, across the UK are trying to achieve – being able to provide a cradle to archive view of a patient, finally joining up all the different back office systems that a physician needs to access to give us a total view of that patient.

More importantly, this can be extended to include not just the information within an NHS Trust, but also a GP system in a local government/external stakeholder Shared Care Record scenario – enabling a clinician, or any approved person who has access to medical records, to see everything that relates to a person, from when they were born to an archive scenario.

An open, highly functional, approach

The IDCR is an enabler to allow access to all these different systems. Ultimately it will become your integrated digital care record for easy secure access across the NHS and beyond.

Why? Because it’s designed to allow all relevant stakeholders, including social care, local authorities, clinicians and GPs, to access your clinical record or social care record. And as it’s architected to be a simple open source, open product that allows you to log in through a portal and then have access to all of the information, it’s revolutionary – and at the moment, we believe we are the only provider who can delivery this on demand. Chief Clinical Information Officers (CCIOs) in the NHS that we’ve talked to tell us they want a single view of all information irrespective of what system if comes from or where that system is, and what make this really interesting is this includes external systems too.

Our solution, then, will allow you to have a single view from any device, anytime from anywhere, from of all of the multiple, different systems, including any case notes or paper that’s been scanned. It can also provide a tracking system to overcome some real issues organisations are having with the referral to treatment (RTT) pathway that means you the patient has to be seen within a certain period of time – something all Trusts, of course, have to monitor, report on and is mandated against with significant fines if they miss their targets.

The SynApps IDCR provides a total view of any GP notes, any x-rays, any illness or ailment you’ve ever had where you’ve had engagement with the social care system, you’ve had engagement with the GP, with an NHS Trust, all displayed in a single view, in a timeline view – which means it’s a really  secure means of providing that real time link to  a patient or citizen or somebody who’s in social care in one single view and could also track where they are in the process.

Save resource

At the moment most Trusts are running over 90% of their referral targets – which sounds like a very high percentage, but the reality is, the ones that fall out are where you see horrible negative local or national press… yeah, the terrible times somebody who should have been seen because they had a serious cancer wasn’t seen, or they got missed for some reason and actually died.

Failing to address this means there’s a huge risk that you’ll miss your NHS compliance targets… and if you miss those targets, you could potentially receive significant fines or even worse go into special measures and all that that implies.

It could also save you a lot of resource, time too; by providing integrated digital care record and a RTT pathway tracking system rather than a validation system, – going from 30 to 40 people down to maybe three or four people to track, not validate, how this works.

Got to make sense, right? If you agree – drop me a line and let’s see how we can get an IDCR to help you with some of your heavy lifting!

Chris Brice is SynApps Solutions’ Director Sales & Marketing