By John McCann – Senior Director of Marketing – EMEA, BridgeHead Software

It could be claimed that The Autumn Statement (by the British government) signalled the moment in which ‘digital’ really came of age in the public sector as politicians recognised that the services we consume need to be delivered in different ways. A simple search of the words ‘digital’ and ‘technology’ in the spending review document highlights this – 58 times and 34 times respectively. Compare this to the 2010 document – 4 and 11 respectively.

The healthcare industry would be forgiven for being a little cock-a-hoop following Mr Osborne’s announcement last week: “the government has chosen to invest £120 billion a year by 2020-21 to protect the position of the NHS as a world class health system, and will drive forward ambitious plans to integrate health and social care services by 2020.” This represents £10 billion more investment than in 2014-2015.

The document also stated: The government will invest £1 billion in new technology over the next 5 years to deliver better connected services for patients and ensure that doctors and nurses have the information they need at their fingertips. By September 2018, 80% of clinicians in primary, urgent and emergency care will have digital access to key patient information. By 2020, integrated care records will give every health and care professional concerned with an individual’s care the information they need to provide safe and prompt care.

This, coupled with news from HIMSS that NHS England is about to appoint a new Chief Information & Technology Officer to ensure the benefits of technology investments in nationally funded programmes are realised, means the next few years in the health IT space might be some of the most exciting and disruptive yet.

Putting care records in the hands of those who need them is something that BridgeHead Software has long been championing. And, given this re-emphasis on information at the point of care, it is worth looking at one of the technologies we believe has the potential to be a key enabler to the holistic patient record.

Not surprisingly, we believe an Enterprise-wide healthcare data management approach is pivotal to achieving the single, integrated (health and social care) view of a patient. But don’t take our word for it. Our independent clinical archive (ICA), also referred to as ‘a next generation VNA’, is the choice for many Trusts up and down the country.

BridgeHead’s HealthStore – our ICA – has the ability to take in data from multiple clinical and business applications (e.g. radiology PACS, electronic document management systems (EDMS), etc.) with multiple data formats (e.g. DICOM, HL7, XDS, CIFS, etc.), storing each object in its native format complete with a full meta-data index for fast search and retrieval. Simply, that means we can help you harness all types of data, capture its unique identifiers, and make it available to those that need it, when they need it.

NHS Trusts and a plethora of specialist healthcare analysts are telling us that an ICA approach is key to helping them meet the Jeremy Hunt’s mandate of 100% digital patient records by 2020.

Clare Jones, Radiology IT Systems Manager at Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust told us: “We knew BridgeHead could assist us with our immediate imaging data needs in a cost effective way. However, BridgeHead was also able to help and guide us to take a long-term, strategic view – ensuring we store and manage other healthcare data in the future as we transition to a fully electronic patient record.”

Earlier this year Dr Jonathan Barber, Divisional Clinical Director of Clinical Support Services, Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said: “For the first time, this will allow us to archive, manipulate and share images from other clinical modalities outside Radiology, in such specialities as Cardiology, Ophthalmology and Medical Illustration. I consider this ability as key to the integration of medical imaging in the development and deployment of our new Electronic Patient Record.”

Today, Bradford is actively looking at ICA from a multi-disciplinary standpoint and as the Trust’s single, enterprise-wide archive for all clinical imaging and non-image data. More on that soon.

It’s all about health, where’s the social care?

Beyond the sharing of data within a hospital environment, there is an obvious emphasis on social care. An ICA does not need to be limited to granting access to applications or individuals within the four walls of that organisation. GPs, third party care providers, community nurses and mental health support staff all need to have access to the most up to date information about the people that they are treating or caring for. Musadiq Subar, IT programme manager at North Middlesex University Hospital Trust, is a key proponent of an independent clinical archive approach to across the care continuum.

Right now, they are working with third party care, primary care and secondary care providers and mental health agencies to understand what data they need and how they can help them gain access to it.

Musadiq Subar, IT programme manager at North Middlesex University Hospital Trust: “…the integration of health and social care, the roles of clinical commissioning groups and third party care providers in the community is evolving. Data needs to be at the centre of our care continuum and our ICA approach to data management ensures that information about patients is available no matter where care is provided.”

There are clear drivers to bring primary care, secondary care, community care, ambulatory services, mental health together across the complete patient journey – sharing data with multiple organisations and applications will be critical to achieving that. It is our view, and clearly the view of some of our customers, that an ICA is becoming a central technology to better enable healthcare’s push towards a full electronic patient record and the wider political drive to better integrate health and social care.