Barnsley Council integrates health and social care records28 November 2012 Barnsley Council has announced it has integrated the NHS and social care records of adults in the local community. The Council is now able to match in real-time an individual’s NHS and social care record through NHS number validation against the Personal Demographics Service (PDS) on the national Spine. Part of the Department of Health Social Care Personal Demographics Service Early Adopters (SCPEA) programme, this initiative sits at the core of Barnsley’s aim to provide seamless health and social care delivery, improving people’s outcomes and independence through better control and governance. Ian Fereday, Business Information Manager, Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council, commented, “The existing model of care delivery is largely one of social care and healthcare as separate entities working in partnership. However, huge transformation can be enabled by technology, allowing every pound invested in health and social care to work as hard as it possibly can while achieving both improved care delivery." Barnsley worked with IT systems developer Liquidlogic, a McKesson company, to integrate the adult social care system and the PDS, enabling Barnsley’s social care workers and care practitioners to validate, in real-time, an individual’s NHS number on their social care record against their healthcare record. This permission-based, real-time validation means at a very basic level that individuals no longer have to be asked for their personal details every time they are visited. More fundamentally than that, though, the solution allows carers to ensure that they are talking about the same person across health and social care and critically prevents duplication or inaccuracy across care records. Moving forward, this will enable relevant information and assessment data to be shared electronically with the individual’s consent, in order to achieve a greater level of seamless care.
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