One Care is working in partnership with Connecting Care to provide better integrated services and safer care for vulnerable groups in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG).

General practice data is shared in Connecting Care via the Medical Interoperability Gateway (MIG), which collects data when a patient is fully registered to a surgery. This means there is a risk vital information is not captured about temporary registered patients and members of the BNSSG homeless community.

To help reduce the clinical risk and provide better care for these groups, Connecting Care proposed to work in collaboration with One Care on a digital solution using the EMIS-X Analytics platform (EXA).

This system is being piloted at the homeless health centre enabling information to be shared about temporary registered patients. This is a new way of working that will provide learning both locally and nationally.

EXA provides a database which contains a full and up to date copy of all the data held in EMIS general practice and community systems. The data is synchronized on a regular basis. One Care’s role is to extract the general practice data using data extraction queries, then import it into the data warehouse where it is formatted and transferred securely to Connecting Care.

The lack of information about temporary registered patients poses a clinical risk. By removing this, we can enable better and safer care for vulnerable groups, offer a more integrated services across different health and care teams and reduce duplication.

Rus Clark, One Care’s IT manager commented on the project saying: “One Care is proud to be part of such an important project. We are contributing to new ways of working that will have a positive and direct impact on our patients, which is what we are here to do.”

For further information on this project, please email onecare.governance@nhs.net.