Better has been chosen by Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust to provide a digital health platform that will help health and care partners to more easily and securely communicate about a person’s care.
The vendor-neutral platform based on openEHR technology will allow authorised health and care professionals to access information in real-time, contribute towards a single care record, and use low-code development tools to create applications for use at the point of care.
The new platform, expected to go live later this year, will support the Trust’s ambition to digitise and integrate mental health and learning disability services across its geographical area and underpin the transformation of services.
Better digital health platform, built on openEHR open-data standards, will be used to store data, and engineering specialists, Avenue3, will support this roll-out by implementing a cutting-edge mental health patient portal on top of the platform.
The portal will be co-designed with service and system users and the initiative is set to enable significant enhancements in the quality of care.
Dr Ayesha Rahim is Consultant Psychiatrist and Chief Medical Information Officer at Surrey and Borders Partnership.
The clinician said: “Improving care for people who use our services drives all that we do.
“Moving to a secure open data platform opens up opportunities for us to better share valuable information with health and care partners to offer timelier and more joined-up care.
“We will be co-designing the patient portal with people who use our services, their families and carers and clinicians to ensure that it is built around meeting the needs of users.”
Users of the new patient portal will be able to record and track their own outcome measures from any device with a web browser.
It will enable the data to be reflected on the person’s electronic patient record within the current ecosystem at the Trust, enabling clinicians to support people who use the Trust’s services to take greater control of their care.
The Trust plans to build on the initial applications, with the potential for the portal to expand, enabling people to view and manage appointments, correspondence and care plans and for further data to be shared between health and care providers to enable more joined-up care, shaped around the person.
Darren Ransley, Managing Director UK&I at Better, said: “Unified and readily available patient data is the lifeblood of any healthcare organisation.
“We are delighted that a trust as innovative as SABP has selected Better and our digital health platform to support their integrated care journey.
“We are seeing momentum towards healthcare organisations choosing digital health platforms, open data, and open standards and are happy that Surrey and Borders Partnership is leading the way for mental health providers in England.”
A second phase of the project will enable key data about a person’s physical health held by other health and care providers to be captured within the Trust’s patient record, supporting the NHS Long Term Plan’s target to increase physical health checks for people with severe mental illness.
