Northern Ireland's health minister Angela Smith announced the launch of the Health and Personal Social Services (HPSS) strategy on Monday saying that the ten-year programme would be backed by a STG95 million investment and will deliver new systems and technology across the health sector in Northern Ireland. A primary objective within the HPSS strategy is to establish an electronic record for every patient in the six counties. These electronic records aim to provide current and historic information on patients and will also contain structured data, text and images gleaned from a variety of sources.
"Better use of information, communicated and shared through reliable and secure networks, is central to modernising the delivery of care, treatment and services to patients and will make vast improvements to the lives of our care professionals," said Smith.
Smith went on to say that the electronic care system would facilitate a faster flow of information such as test results, referrals and appointments and enable decisions on care to be made much quicker. "It will also provide the opportunity for a widespread exchange of information between care professionals throughout the various organisations within our health and social services," she said.
While for now the electronic care record idea is still at a conceptual stage, the HPSS has plans to begin work on compiling a roadmap as to how it will progress towards the establishment of the new system. In the meantime the HPSS will continue to learn from experiences in England with a particular focus on confidentiality and consent.
For the time being, the HPSS is concentrating on implementing goals such as providing access to e-mail and the internet for all GPs by the end of 2005, and access to e-mail, internet and desktop services for all Northern Ireland care professionals by the end of 2010.
Further down the line the HPSS strategy aims to implement direct booking of appointments, increased use of video and tele-links, electronic prescribing in hospitals and electronic test requesting and results service.
The news of the strategy was welcomed by the British Medical Association's General Practitioner Committee in Northern Ireland, with the association's deputy chairman, Dr. Jimmy Courtney, saying it will help Northern Ireland's GPs to link with all segments of the country's health service.
Autor: Deirdre McArdle
Quelle: ElectricNews, 23.03.2005
