Value in Healthcare Awards: Value and Improvement in using IT to support integrated healthcare services

County Durham and Darlington FT in liaison with County Durham and Darlington Community Health Service: Information sharing within multidisciplinary teams and organisations – enabling true patient level service planning

The judges said: “Our winner has solved a problem that others have struggled with. It has a good understanding of risk and strong partnership working. This is a ground breaking approach to a wicked problem.”

The smooth integration of information between sectors was essential to this project’s success.

Looking to improve integrated planning and delivery approaches, Country Durham and Darlington FT noticed that there was space for improvement in the approach to the treatment frail and older people with co-morbidities.

After analysing the silos of primary, secondary care it was identified by the trust that the care of the frail and elderly could benefit from improved joined up care. However, concerns and fears over information governance and data analysis presented a barrier to joined up care; no one had addressed the problem of sharing information both internally and externally.

This issue presented a significant barrier to successful cross organisational working and so service providers in County Durham and Darlington concluded that they would have to address the way in which information is shared.

This led to the development of co-produced information sharing agreements (ISA). These documents enabled all parties to agree what information would be shared, how it would be shared, and how it would be transferred, stored and disposed of.  

The development of the project involved two phases of information sharing for specific projects. During the first phase, which focussed on data analysis, 3,000 frail elderly patients in the area were identified. Data was then shared between social, mental and acute services to determine how many of these patients were known to them. The results of this phase found that informed planning of capacity and roles was needed.

In phase two the process of ISA was decided. It was agreed that no future ISA could begin without agreement from clinical staff and only after the third party sector organisations introduced were willing to comply with support.

The multidisciplinary team for which the ISA objective was created is now sharing live data and exceeding its target of a 3.5 per cent reduction in hospital admissions. Also, the number of frail elderly admissions from local care homes targeted by the multidisciplinary team has reduced by 30 per cent.

• See all the winners of the Value in Healthcare Awards 2015
• See the full list of award judges

Finalists

• Barts Health Trust: referapatient – an online platform streamlining the complex and inefficient process of making acute referrals
• Cwm Taf University Local Health Board: Commissioning Care Assurance and Performance System
• Muscular Dystrophy UK: Neuromuscular Hub Website
• NHS Calderdale CCG: A Quest for Quality – using technology to support long term conditions management in care homes
• Pathfinder Healthcare Developments CIC: Health Communities Collaborative project
• Sycamore House Medical Centre: GP Web Portal Design: Integral to Integration
• Vitality Partnership: An integrated approach to care supported by Vitality Health Hub