The Urgent Care Plan: Bringing patient personalised care and making it a reality

"Having an integrated care planning application means that people can access the platform irrespective of what electronic patient record they use and go to a single source of truth," said Murrae Tolson about the new care planning solution in London.

In December last year, Better signed the contract to deliver a new shared care planning solution for the city of London. Seven months later, the solution has gone live across five integrated care systems, over 1400 GP practices, more than 40 NHS trusts, and 33 local authorities covering approximately 10 million people. The end-of-life care plan ensures that care is tailored to a patient's personal needs and delivered as close to home as possible, supporting a collaborative and data-first approach.

In the fifth webinar of the Better webinar series "openEHR: Bringing theory to life" we hosted Murrae Tolson, programme director of the Urgent Care Plan, who told us that there are well over 24 different electronic patient records in use across London. "And having an integrated care planning application means that people can access the platform irrespective of what electronic patient record they use. They can go to a single source of truth that shares not only what matters to me but also what's the matter with me. So really bringing patient personalised care and making that a reality," she said.

One of the benefits that the users report is that they are really benefiting from the fact that they don't need to have a separate sign-on and are able to access their care plans in context with the single sign-on via their host electronic patient records. "From a practical perspective, what has been amazing is the ability for us to really make quick changes to the care plan templates. Just in a few months there have already been about 50 changes to the templates and we have been able to implement them and make those changes to the template really quickly," said Ms. Tolson. She also added that they now have 61.000 care plans in the system and are seeing the number of users increasing each month.

And what would she advise someone who is thinking about doing a similar thing that OneLondon has done? "First, you have to have a fundamental belief that what you are doing is right. The second thing is to get support from a different range of stakeholders across the system and that you are able to create a coalition of the willing and able. And the third thing that I would advise is to work in partnership. You really have to collaborate, co-produce, and make mutual compromises to deliver what's good enough in the first instance. In the healthcare sector, there isn't a lot of room for making mistakes and I think it is really important that you think what is good enough for now to start so that you can build on it," Murrae Tolson said.

The Urgent Care Plan is based on the openEHR standard that enables information and data sharing. "It's got the capability of adding a lot of information into the platform and this gives us the capability to be able to shape a care plan and to have the richness of information, based on a person's needs. We can then customise it and make the information visible to users in such a way that it is applicable to their situation so that they can clearly see the information that is relevant for the care and support of that individual," said Murrae Tolson.