What would we do differently if we started with the patient’s journey?
That was the question we put to a packed room of NHS leaders at 30 Euston Square on 11 November. We were there to launch the country’s first single EPR platform for primary and secondary care, and show what becomes possible when GP practices and hospitals can work from the same patient record.
Think about what happens when someone moves between their GP and hospital. How often does a team have to chase a referral, check a medication list or ask a patient to repeat something they’ve already told another clinician?
Nervecentre CEO, Paul Volkaerts, opened the day by making the case for tackling those problems across whole regions. Dr Charlotte Refsum, from the Tony Blair Institute, explored how primary care could help organise care around the patient, wherever that care takes place. Then Tom Hardy showed what that could look like. His live demo followed a patient between their GP practice and hospital, with both teams working from the same up-to-date information – with Patientcentre enabling communication and collaboration between them.
We also looked at how to give clinicians more time with patients during the appointment itself. Paul Latimer gave a live demo of NiO, our new AI capabilities built into everyday clinical workflows. He showed how NiO can take relevant details from a conversation, fill in fields in the patient record and automate actions and create follow-up tasks, all ready for the clinician to review and approve.
In the afternoon panel, we took that discussion to a broader scale. The panel answered the big questions around how digital can improve productivity and deliver macroeconomic benefit:
- How can EPRs support the transition of care from hospitals into the community?
- Where are the biggest opportunities for trusts to improve NHS productivity?
- Can interoperability help the NHS deliver the outcomes and productivity it needs?
- And, if we were designing the NHS’s digital infrastructure from scratch today, would we really give every organisation its own EPR?
There was a real appetite in the room to do things differently. Thank you to everyone who joined us and shared their experience of what it takes to make care work better across organisational boundaries.
