Digital Revolution

A digital revolution in health and care

Like all parts of the country, NHS and social care services in Cheshire and Merseyside face significant challenges and demands; particularly in providing joined-up information for those that receive our services. Clear, consistent and up-to-date documentation is crucial to ensuring an individuals’ journey through complex healthcare is unified throughout their whole life – and a particular challenge at a time when budgets are under pressure.

Cheshire and Merseyside is already one of the leading regions in the country in terms of the ways we are harnessing technology to tackle these challenges and improve patient care. We are already starting to improve the health and wellbeing of the local population thanks to the implementation of an electronic shared health and care record, named the ‘Share2Care e-Xchange’.

This portal contains a wide range of documentation (including medication history and diagnoses) from hospitals across Cheshire and Merseyside, as well as Lancashire and South Cumbria, giving the approved clinicians appropriate access to support them in the delivery of safer and more effective care to our patients.

Alongside this, we’ve made investments to enhance picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) across the footprint to improve record sharing and cross-organisational working. We are also working to procure standardised security information and event management (SIEM) systems, which will be implemented in 2020/21.

Finally, in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, we recently launched the Combined Intelligence for Population Health Action (CIPHA) programme, which has brought together all of the datasets from health and social care settings in Cheshire and Merseyside. This will help us to make informed decisions through tracking the spread (epidemiology) of the disease, identifying hotspots and better understanding capacity and demand in the system.