CIPHA welcomes Tony Blair Institute paper on Digital Health Records – supports further development of existing health records.
20 August 2024
The CIPHA (Combined Intelligence for Population Health Action) programme has welcomed the Tony Blair Institute paper ‘Preparing the NHS for the AI Era: A Digital Health Record for Every Citizen,’ which was published today.
According to TBI, a Digital Health Record (DHR) for every citizen is a critical part of NHS reform. It would give patients more control over their own health information, and data-drive insights would enable greater innovation and more effective preventative care.
CIPHA supports the further development of existing health records to meet the DHR functionality described in the report. According to TBI, the advantage of this option is that it builds on existing infrastructure, with existing information-governance solutions, existing relationships with clinicians and system leaders, and existing connections to providers of care.
Between them, 11 CIPHA members, who all use the Graphnet platform, have full longitudinal patient records for over 17m citizens so for these ICSs, further development of this platform is the only logical way forward. Members work together to develop, trial and deploy major transformation initiatives based on data from patients’ digital health records.
CIPHA welcomes new members, but also supports the principle that other ICSs with suitable platforms should be able to build on what they have, provided that they can meet the required national standards in a cost effective and timely manner.
This collaborative programme model could be used to drive through the following enhancements, to help deliver the vision in the DHR report.
- the definition, development and deployment of APIs to support connectivity at a national level
- integration with the National Record locator service so that patient records can be assembled easily when details are held in more than one ICS.
- the alignment of the Federated Data Platform with the CIPHA architecture so that FDP population health use cases can be supported by the CIPHA architecture.
- supporting a library of third-party apps so that clinically approved apps for conditions such as diabetes, heart failure and mental health issues can exchange data with the DHR.
- improving access to patient facing applications such as the NHS App
- accelerating progress on the development and deployment of population health driven transformation programmes.
- providing the platform and data to support advances in AI.
Mersey Care CEO, Professor Joe Rafferty said:
These records have been developed over many years at considerable effort and expense and it makes absolute sense to build on what we have. It also means that we can maintain the significant buy-in and momentum that we have achieved with patients, staff and provider organisations over our years of population health development.
In Cheshire and Merseyside, we are now benefiting from a wide range of applications including remote monitoring of heavy service users, waiting list management and fuel poverty. The enhanced case finding tool has become a key tool for identifying candidates for interventions (telehealth and integrated care teams for example) and diabetic and frailty use cases are becoming embedded.
The flow of data for analyst use is a key ingredient in providing analysts with a rich data set to create bespoke analysis and is at the heart of our Data into Action programme. If the TBI model is adopted, CIPHA will be a fast and efficient way for our member ICSs to achieve its goals.
Fiona Edwards, CEO of Frimley ICB and Chair of the Thames Valley and Surrey (TVS) Partnership Board which manages the care record and population health system, covers over 4m citizens across NHS Frimley ICB, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West ICS and Surrey Heartlands ICS said:
We spent over five years building our data and population health platforms and they are fully embedded in many of our care pathways. We are seeing substantial patient and organisational benefits from data driven initiatives and they are at the heart of our transformation programmes. It is obvious we need to build from what we have rather than starting again with a new national scheme and the expanded uses detailed in the TBI report are natural and much needed extensions to the work we are doing.
Gordon Flack, CFO of Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust and SRO for the Kent CIPHA programme, The Kent and Medway Care Record said:
We have invested heavily over many years in building our data platform with extensive patient records for 2m Kent citizens and we now have over 10,000 clinicians using the record. The system is used for a wide range of uses including improved management of waiting lists, shared record access and remote patient monitoring. We have real momentum now and it is important that we continue building from what we have.
