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Developing a regional shared care record for Doncaster CCG

The CCG appointed Channel 3 to explore the best approach to delivering shared care record, which would begin as a Proof of Concept being used across a small number of pathways, but allow for future expansion across other services, pathways and organisations.

Doncaster CCG and its regional partners had undertaken a significant programme to transform the way they deliver intermediate care services to patients and service users across Doncaster. These complex services are delivered by multi-disciplinary teams across the ambulance service, local authority, community & mental health and acute NHS trusts. To deliver an effective service to users, each member of the care team requires access to a comprehensive care record, along with access to contact details, care team information and workflow tasks.

What challenges did we face?

The CCG appointed Channel 3 to explore the best approach to delivering shared care record, which would begin as a Proof of Concept being used across a small number of pathways, but allow for future expansion across other services, pathways and organisations. Budget was a particular challenge for the partners, so identifying the best value solution was imperative.

What was our approach?

Our team of experienced consultants worked directly with the CCG and its partners to determine the best approach for delivering a shared care record. An Integrated Digital Care Record approach was selected. The chosen solution would pull information from each of the organisations’ systems and present all the relevant patient or service user data in one place, in real time, at the point of care. This involved working directly with doctors, nurses, carers and other stakeholders across the region to understand their needs and service delivery challenges. A combination of one-to-one meetings, workshops, functional analysis and other techniques was used to build a holistic understanding of informatics strategies, current systems, resources and technical challenges in order to develop a detailed specification. This level of engagement also helped to foster buy-in to the project across the organisations and their teams.

Having developed an outcomes-based specification, designed to meet both the immediate and future needs of the regional teams, Channel 3 ran a robust and transparent procurement process, supporting Doncaster CCG throughout the selection process. We were subsequently retained to handle the commercial negotiations and support the deployment and benefits management work streams of the project.

What impact did we have?

We delivered a specification which was based on a combination of outcomes and outputs that would meet the needs of the intermediate care service today. A supplementary specification was also developed to express future needs and plans for expansion, within the current service and across new areas.

Our procurement specialists ran a coherent, transparent procurement process to ensure that the market was properly engaged and potential suppliers had equal access to the bid. The procurement resulted in the selection of a partner and solution offering the very best value to the Doncaster Partners and the users of the intermediate care services.

Our contracting expertise ensured that this offer translated into a robust commercial agreement and the subsequent services delivery. 

The new IDCR system launched in May 2018 and delivered:

  • Improvements in the quality of patient-centred care
  • Accurate, real time patient data
  • Clear audit trail of all interventions
  • Proactive joined-up working across health and social care
  • Reduction in unplanned hospital admissions through improvements in community care provision
  • Support for further care service re-design and delivery projects.

I would recommend Channel 3 Consulting to other NHS organizations working on complex technical integration projects, as their team can be trusted to engage professionally and effectively across all partners

Andrew Clayton
Head of Health Informatics
Doncaster and Rotherham CCGS

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