NHS South Worcestershire CCG pilots new technology from Advanced and Black Pear to enhance palliative care

NHS South Worcestershire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) is leading the trial of newly integrated technology from Advanced and Black Pear. This will ensure information can be shared more effectively between primary care providers and Out of Hours (OOH) and NHS111 providers on behalf of the three clinical commissioning groups in Worcestershire.

The 12-month pilot began in May 2016 and involves 67 GP practices, three hospices, the regional Ambulance Service, and palliative care staff.

Advanced and Black Pear Software, a provider of interoperable clinical applications are partnering with Worcester Well Connected (a health and social care programme being delivered by all the local NHS organisations) to deliver the EPaCCs (Electronic Palliative Care Coordination Systems) project.

GPs, paramedics, hospice staff and palliative care teams input special notes or patient preferences for end of life care into Black Pear’s electronic shared plan service. This is pre-populated with information from patient records already held in EMIS Web, the most widely used primary care clinical system in the UK.

This new integration makes these details automatically available in Adastra, the patient management system from Advanced, which is used by the OOH and NHS111 call handlers.

NHS South Worcestershire CCG, NHS Redditch and Bromsgrove CCG and NHS Wyre Forest CCG commission healthcare services on behalf of the county’s 500,000 population and together are funding the trial, with Care UK, the OOH provider, and Vocare, the NHS111 provider participating.

Debbie Westwood, Senior Programme Lead for NHS South Worcestershire CCG, says, “We already had a robust end-of-life care pathway and were sharing information between organisations, but that was via fax or email which involved re-keying data and was inefficient.

“We were really keen to be involved with Advanced and Black Pear’s trial of this newly integrated technology, as it will provide a more modern, streamlined way of working – making our staff’s lives easier. Most importantly patients will also have a better experience and can be assured their wishes will be adhered to, regardless of which provider is taking care of them or if they lose capacity to share their views.”

Care UK and Vocare already use Adastra to guide their call handlers and clinicians through the triage process. This new integration will allow primary care staff to share the palliative care information, with the patient’s consent, with the OOH and NHS111 staff at the click of a button. If patients’ wishes change, the record can be easily updated online.

Debbie Westwood adds, “This technology supports our drive to be paperless and be more efficient, in line with the NHS’ Five Year Forward View.

“Our administrative staff and clinicians are already feeling the benefit, with more time available to spend with patients, who in turn are receiving an enhanced service. Greater interoperability of systems is another step on our digital roadmap to move away from silos of patient information and towards more accessible data that can be easily shared.”

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Notes to Editors

About Black Pear

Black Pear Software provides proven solutions to enable federated working and new models of care. As a market-leading provider of interoperable clinical applications, our apps extend existing systems with read/write capability to current clinical systems, preventing the need to “rip and replace”. This is being widely used for cross-system appointment bookings, sharing patient information and consultation outcomes anytime, anywhere as part of CSU, CCG and Prime Minister Challenge Fund schemes.

Dr David Jehring, a former GP, formed Black Pear in 2009. Alongside his team, the company has extensive knowledge of healthcare informatics in the past has developed the first Windows GP system, as well as implementing the first national data extraction and analysis system responsible for underpinning many national programs.

www.blackpear.com

About Worcestershire Clinical Commissioning Groups

The three Worcestershire Clinical Commissioning Groups are responsible for arranging health services on behalf of their local patients.

Specifically this means they are responsible for:

•Planning health services, based on assessing local needs

•Paying for services that meet the needs of patients (also known as ‘commissioning’)

•Monitoring the quality of the services and care provided to patients.

The organisations commission hospital, community and mental health services.

About Advanced

Through our enterprise and market focused solutions we positively impact millions of people’s lives through continually investing in our people, partnerships and own technologies to stay focused on our markets’, customers’ and their stakeholders’ needs.

We enable our customers to drive efficiencies, savings and growth opportunities through focused, right-first-time software solutions that evolve with the changing needs of their business and the markets they operate in.

True partnership is the defining thing that makes us different from the competition.

We pride ourselves on delivering focused software solutions for public sector, enterprise commercial and health & care organisations that simplify complex business challenges and deliver immediate value.

Advanced is a Sunday Times Top Track 250 Company 2015 and was ranked in the Deloitte UK Fast 50 which recognises the 50 fastest growing technology companies in the UK and a winner of the Tech Company of the Year in PwC’s UK Tech Awards in 2014.

www.oneadvanced.com

Press Contacts:
Angela Mycock and Kathryn Howard, Advanced
pr@advancedcomputersoftware.com
+44(0)1625 856 513