PHCSG CLICSIG report on Shared Care Records
This report is the result of an exploration of risks and concerns about the use of shared patient records carried out by Clinical Special Interest Group (CLICSIG) of the British Computer Society's Primary Health Care Specialist Group (PHCSG).
Foreword
The topic was the subject of several meetings, starting in 2008, and culminated in two virtual meetings held in June 2020. As the use of, and interest in shared records is spreading, understandably because of their potential to ensure more coherent - and so better - patient care, the PHCSG considered it timely to publish their findings and the conclusions drawn from them.
The report is intended for reading by general practice clinicians, informaticians, standards developers, clinical system developers and others with an interest in making the union between information technology, informatics and medicine deeper and more fruitful. Although it originated in primary care, we believe it will be of use to clinicians, health informaticians, system developers and information policy makers generally.
Here is a glossary of acronyms used in the report. Acronyms are shown in bold wherever they appear in the document.
| Acronym | Explanation |
|---|---|
| CSR | Composite shared record - a kind of shared (patient) record consisting of fragments of records of prime entry created by one or more organisations caring for the patient, where a contributor considers that others caring for the patient need to be made aware of the information the fragment contains. |
| DOI | Digital Object Identifier - a string of numbers, letters and symbols used to permanently identify an article or document available on the web. |
| LHCR | Locality Health Care Record - a patient record that provides summary information about the care provided by organisations within a locality, typically a region that can be considered to offer the full range of health facilities. Whether a LHCR should include information about residents in its area from units providing specialist services nationwide, such as Papworth, Broadmoor, Stoke Manderville., etc is currently an open question. Many LHCRs are taking the form of a Composite Shared Record. |
| PHCSG | Primary Health Care Specialist Group- a specialist subgroup of the British Computer Society. |
| PRSB | Professional Record Standards Body - the body which sets standards for healthcare records. |
| QOf | Quality and Outcomes Framework - one of the ways in which GP practices are remunerated (for hitting targets). |
| RBAC | Role Based Access Control - the use of a role type to control the kind of data that someone - e.g. a clinician - can see |
| SR | Shared Record (of any sort), usually where contributors share all or part of their own patient care records of prime entry about a patient |
| SNOMED | SNOMED is a commonly used abbreviation for SNOMED CT, which is the official term for the structured clinical vocabulary mandated for use in English health records. Its full title is the Systematised Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms. |
| SSEPR | Single shared electronic patient record - a synonym used currently to describe the SystmOne SSR (see below). |
| SSR | Single shared record- the preferred term in this report for a single record of prime entry used by two or more care organisations as their sole repository for patient information. Save as requested by the patient or required by the law, the entire record is visible to all the organisations using it. |
