Gloucestershire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) is planning to extend the integrated care system for the county’s NHS to social services.
Dr Paul Atkinson, chief clinical information officer for the CCG, said it is working with Gloucestershire County Council to integrate data from children’s social care within the next few weeks, and to add adult services at a later date.
This follows the integration of data from GPs, acute trusts and mental health trusts since the launch of the Joining Up Your Information (JUYI) platform early last year.
Atkinson said the plan to include social care is ready to go to the clinical group for final approval, in which case it will go onto the next release schedule for the system.
“Our adult social care was previously on a locally grown system from which they are migrating away to one of the largest suppliers,” he said. “Fortunately they’ve chosen the same electronic records system as children’s social care and we’ve built that integration, so the migration for adult social care should be relatively quick to bring in.”
He added that there is an issue to resolve in developing a secure authentication process for social care users. Healthcare users have secured access through NHS smartcards and multi-factor authentication, while the council’s social care teams currently use single factor authentication.
“We don’t want to relax on that standard, so we’re talking to the county council about how we provide access to the regulated social care professionals with security standpoint,” he said.
“One option is issuing them with smartcards; there is some infrastructure behind that. We’ll see if the council wants us to go ahead with that.
“It’s important to us to maintain multi-factor to maintain trust in the system.”
JUYI is a cloud based platform developed with digital services company Kainos and using open APIs and the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource standard. Atkinson said it has information on around 680,000 residents of the county and is currently receiving around 400 hits per day from users.
Image from iStock, mipan
Amended on 13 February pm to remove reference to early integration of out-of-hours services
