New demographics services for Wales

Tags: Informing Healthcare PDS Wales

05 Jan 2009

Informing Healthcare is to roll-out its own demographics services from this month after sharing systems with England for more than two decades.

The first phase of the Welsh Demographic Services, developed by Informing Healthcare in collaboration with Health Solutions Wales, will deliver online patient tracing, batch tracing and an application programming interface to provide links from other systems, such as the Individual Health Record and patient administration systems.

Roll-out of the service is due to begin this month and be completed by the end of March 2009.

Informing Healthcare said it estimated that 95% of traces for Welsh residents would be found on the Welsh Demographic Service using an ‘advanced trace’ and where no match is found a trace request will be passed on to the Personal Demographic Service in England.

The agency said that in phase one, traces to the PDS would be made using a ‘simple trace’ that would return a record only if an exact single match could be found. It said this limitation was imposed by a Memorandum of Understanding for use of Spine services between NHS Wales and NHS Connecting for Health but was an interim measure.

NHS Wales has negotiated with the National Programme for IT in the NHS to use selected services to preserve existing systems such as the allocation of NHS numbers.

The batch tracing service provided by the Welsh Demographic Service will replace the previous service provided by the NHS Central Register and the National Strategic Tracing Service. The NSTS is one of four services currently used by Wales which are to be replaced by the Spine with the NSTS due to be the first to close in March 2009.

The project will also develop a Welsh Birth Notification Service and link the Welsh access system to the Spine to maintain the ability to receive information about patient registration after the Central Health Register Inquiry System (CHRIS) is decommissioned in 2009.

Link

Informing Healthcare

Fiona Barr

Reader's Comments

Identity, identity, identity

05 Jan 09 16:01

Clinical staff are adept at dealing with missing records - as long as they know they are missing. It's inconvenient, it wastes time and it leads to needless retesting. There is potential for harm - but it is largely known and manageable risk.

Far more potential for harm resides in a situation where staff have incomplete or erroneously attributed records - yet they are unaware of it.

A duplicate registration: I believe I have my patient's full record in front of me when I don't

A conflated registration: I believe I have records which belong ONLY to my patient when some of them belong to another patient

I now work in a fairly esoteric aspect of clinical software application development. However I have ten years experience as a physician in clinical and laboratory medicine. I was >never< more scared than when these situations were [eventually] recognised in patients we were treating.

Certainly it happens with paper records but it's far harder to spot and unpick conflation in a computer record - clues of stationary and handwriting etc are lacking. There is also a (false) sense of security when reading well presented records on-screen.

Duplicate or conflated registrations at any signicant frequency (? 1:1000, 1:10,000 patients) stand to completely undo any possible benefit of shared records.

Jungle drums are beating increasingly loudly about this issue in the NPfIT arena. A journalist submitting an FOI request for estimated rates of duplicates and conflation in centrally held patient registers might be richly rewarded.

If the patient demographics aren't right we might as well pack it in right now and save a few billion. Happy New Year

Identity at the bridge

06 Jan 09 20:01

Oh the joys of devolution. I was at a meeting considering Renal care across the South of England last year. The chaps in Bristol were quite excited by the complexities of Welsh patients who go to Bristol for certain aspects of care, and get dialysis an outpatient visits in Wales. Prospect of split pathology results, elements of recorded care, and drug records. And up and down the length of Offas Dyke, there are patients who will for certain care be treated "abroad", one side or other.

So just when we in England are all exhorted to use the NHS number, despite central failures to link hospital systems to a real-time search facility, Wales wanders off to have a separate demographic service.

How very like neighbouring hospitals having their own numbers. Is that a blow for Cambrian freedom, or a foolish move ?