CMC manages over 25,000 individual care plans for patients receiving urgent and palliative care in the greater London area. The CMC service, which is hosted by The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and built on the InterSystems HealthShare® health informatics and interoperability platform, ensures that patients' personally approved care plans are shared with general practitioners (GPs), community nurses, community palliative care teams, hospitals, hospices, social workers, London Ambulance Service, NHS 111 and care homes. CMC's aim is to ensure that all the healthcare professional teams involved in a patient's care are connected 24/7.

"Before creating the auto lookup to CMC, we relied on cross-checks between patients visiting the hospital and patients registered with a CMC urgent care plan. These plans were traditionally emailed to the Trust and manually uploaded to the patient administration system (PAS). With our clinicians increasingly using mobile devices at the patient’s bedside, we developed a mobile application to access the digital care record. We included an automatic lookup to CMC, which creates an alert in the patient record showing if a patient has an urgent care plan," says Matthew Kybert, Systems Development & Integration Manager, Hillingdon Hospitals Foundation Trust.

Development time for the new auto lookup was minimized since both CMC and the Trust already use InterSystems technology, enabling the Trust to go live within just a few weeks. J2 Interactive, a healthcare technology consultancy and an InterSystems partner since 2003, supported the rapid implementation.

"The technical teams at InterSystems and J2 Interactive were extremely supportive, enabling us to Integrate with the CMC web service in four weeks from test to live deployment," says Pretesh Kotecha, Senior Systems Integration Specialist, Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

CMC is the first external source to be included in the mobile digital care record, and it will now ensure that clinicians have more complete patient information in real time, in any care setting. If a CMC care plan is in place, an alert appears on the patient banner giving the clinician access to the plan, thereby ensuring patients' care plan goals are met.

"The Hillingdon Care Record has revolutionised our assessment of patients, allowing us to access relevant information relating to our patients, all from one platform. It's proved most useful when assessing new patients that have come into hospital, allowing us to get a full picture of a patient's medical history," Dr Suraj Dabhi, FY1 HO at Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

"With Trusts such as Hillingdon already making use of the newer, faster, more intuitive CMC urgent care plan system, uptake should rise across the capital and beyond," said Mark Palmer, Country Manager at InterSystems. "The integrated patient record alert system at Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is one of the first examples of how care providers will benefit from the new system in practice. To make sure progress continues, we will continue to work with CMC and other Trusts to ensure connectivity with more GPs, community services, and acute and urgent care IT systems. This culminates in the delivery of full interoperability, allowing users to seamlessly use the CMC service from within their host systems where appropriate, wherever they are."

Related news articles:

• InterSystems' Profile

About Hillingdon NHS Foundation Trust
Our services are provided from both Hillingdon Hospital and Mount Vernon Hospital. The Trust has a turnover of around £222 million and we employ over 3,300 staff. We deliver high quality healthcare to the residents of the London Borough of Hillingdon, and increasingly to those living in the surrounding areas of Ealing, Harrow, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire, giving us a total catchment population of over 350,000 people.

About CMC
Coordinate My Care (CMC), established in 2012, is a shared clinical service that allows healthcare professionals to record patients' wishes and ensures their personalised urgent care plans are available to all those who care for them. CMC is working to empower patients to have choices about the care they receive by linking up the organisations that provide care for a patient. A personalised urgent care plan can be prepared and recorded on CMC to enable all care providers, who have been trained and have a login in and password, to access this information all day, every day. All urgent care providers who care for patients during the out of hours period, such as 111 and the ambulance service, can access CMC and the individualised plans 24/7. This gives patients the security that their wishes, preferences and plans for care will be respected and delivered, day and night. Clinical Commissioning Groups, NHS Trusts, nursing homes, hospices and community providers all play an integral role in the successful coordination of care. As a team we bring extensive clinical experience to drive the cultural and operational change required to deliver integrated, coordinated, and quality care for patients.

About InterSystems
InterSystems provides the information engines that power some of the world's most important applications. In healthcare, finance, government, and other sectors where lives and livelihoods are at stake, InterSystems has been a strategic technology provider since 1978. InterSystems is a privately held company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA), with offices worldwide, and its software products are used daily by millions of people in more than 100 countries.