Introduction

Abstract

Extract Digitalizing Mr Jones’s Health Edward Jones is a retired coal miner living on his own in north-east England. He is a non-insulin dependent diabetic with coronary heart disease. During a consultation with his general practitioner (GP), Mr Jones agreed to have an electronic health record (EHR) created as part of his overall care plan. This allows information about Mr Jones’s medical conditions to be made available to other healthcare providers, for example to ambulance services and hospital medical staff, if an emergency were to occur. In addition, Mr Jones is able to use a portal to add information of his own to the record from his home computer such as details of his next of kin and what to do in the event of an emergency. Some months later Mr Jones is at home and starts to experience severe chest pains. He calls ‘NHS Direct’, a 24-hour telephone helpline established in England in 1998 and now discontinued. A patient advisor accesses his electronic health record, which shows clinical information and details about his domestic circumstances. The patient advisor calls an ambulance and with Mr Jones’s agreement informs his next of kin to let her know he is on the way to hospital. As the ambulance is called, the paramedics on board are automatically passed key information from Mr Jones’s record relevant to the emergency (such as his current medications and any allergies) in order that they are fully informed before they arrive at his home. Similarly, at the hospital emergency department, test results from his most recent visit as an outpatient to the cardiovascular department are automatically made available to the medical team on duty from the hospital’s own patient record system. Further, any interventions the paramedics make on the way such as blood pressure checks or other test results are immediately uploaded to the hospital systems on arrival. As Mr Jones is wheeled into the emergency department, the receiving medical team already has at its disposal a care pathway populated with key clinical information about his condition, even down to printed labels to attach to his test samples once taken. Of great comfort to Mr Jones and his family is the knowledge that wherever this emergency might have occurred in England, all the necessary information would have been available to the clinicians in exactly the same way.

Ähnliche Arbeiten