Professionals

The Great North Care Record is a way of sharing health and care information across the North East and North Cumbria which is accessed by authorised health and care practitioners.

It means that key information about people’s health and care such as diagnoses, medications, details of hospitals admissions and treatments is shared between different healthcare services including hospitals, out of hours and ambulance services.

Phase one of Great North Care Record gave accident and emergency, out of hours, ambulance, mental health and 111-services read only access to the GP record for the 3.6million people living in the North East and North Cumbria. This was using technology called the Medical Interoperability Gateway (MIG) and was the first step in the process towards creating an integrated care record. It was vital to getting information sharing agreements using the Information Sharing Gateway (ISG) set up and for the region to adapt data sharing.

Much of the work that has gone on over the last three years was about building a culture of information sharing and encouraging the region to work in collaboration. It was about setting up the networks and teams necessary to implement the next stage of the project.

It was about learning about how we bring different sectors and agencies together to work towards a common goal and vision.

There are three modules in the next phase of the Great North Care Record:

• A regional Health Information Exchange (HIE) which supports direct patient care, providing a system view of a patient’s record
• A Patient Engagement Platform (PEP) which provides individuals with access to their own record
• A Public Health Management system which analyses data from across the system to improve insight and outcomes for people in our region