Connected Nottinghamshire have used the Medical Interoperability Gateway (MIG) to save time and money across Nottinghamshire.
In 2015 Connected Nottinghamshire wanted to find a way of sharing key information (General Practice records) to manage the treatment of patients with urgent/emergency care needs.
Nottinghamshire have 146 GPs using a mix of EMIS web and TPP system one. The interim solutions that were in place didn’t meet all of their requirements and having met with us they felt that the Detailed Care Record (DCR) could provide a fully integrated system with clinically-rich patient data.
Rushcliffe Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), part of Connected Nottinghamshire, were the trailblazers for this project and launched an out of hours service in 12 GPs in the local area.
These services are underpinned by the MIG, to ensure appropriate data sharing and consent were in place and this allowed the duty clinicians to access parts of the patients’ records from each GP.
“Members from Rushcliffe CCG went to Healthcare Gateway and asked them for flexibility around this project, the team were more than accommodating and we were then able to go back to the CCG and satisfy them that this was a safe and robust system to use.”
Rushcliffe CCG ran local roadshows to engage with GPs and worked with the Local Medical Committee (LMC) at the start of the project.
We used our experience to answer all the questions raised by the LMC and Information Governance about sharing data between organisations. The LMC played an important role in convincing the 12 GPs to use the MIG.
“The MIG consent model gives explicit consent at the point access meaning the patient can always say no if they are not comfortable sharing their patient record - the MIG is perfect in this scenario.
Clinicians that we first started working with have now become champions of data sharing and use of the MIG for the other areas.”
By adopting the MIG, Connected Nottinghamshire has received consent to share over 99% of their patient records and has run further road shows in other CCGs around data sharing.
Clinicians who used the MIG said that it had improved patient safety and helped to avoid potential clinical incidents.
It’s estimated that the MIG has helped the Rushcliffe GPs to:
prevent at least one hospital admission per month
save around two minutes per appointment in across their out of hours service, which equals 32 minutes of daily appointment time, or two extra appointments per day for weekend services.
A nurse using the MIG in an out of ours service, said the DCR had prevented an accident and emergency (A&E) incident.
The patient was referred with back pain and had requested a strong pain killer, noting he had run out of his current prescription.
By using the DCR, the nurse practitioner was able to access the patient’s medical record and establish that they’d been prescribed Tramadol from an outpatient appointment until their operation.
Without this information the nurse would have been unwilling to prescribe Tramadol, which could have resulted in the patient attending A&E where the outpatient’s record was held.
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