West of Scotland creates regional portal

A project linking the Orion Health portals in use at five West of Scotland health boards has been completed and is already delivering benefits to clinicians.

The regional portal means that Scottish health boards covering a population of 2.2 million people are now able to share patient information.

Five West of Scotland health boards are covered by the two-year project to link their Orion Health portals, with NHS Dumfries and Galloway the latest to join.

Clinicians can now click on a simple link within their own health board’s portal to access the regional portal links, from where they can view test results and other information.

The regional portal was created to mitigate the difficulties of finding information about patients who were being treated outside their home health board.

The regional portal is being well used. Already, clinicians are accessing 3-4,000 cross board records every week, and there have been more than 50,000 log-ons so far this year. However, it could be extended further.

Nick Reed, consultant in clinical oncology, Beatson Oncology Centre, said: “As a cancer specialist, I work within a regional service, and between 55 and 60 per cent of our patients do not reside within the Greater Glasgow and Clyde catchment area. They come from surrounding health boards and, occasionally, if they have a very rare cancer, from other parts of Scotland.

“We could find some information for them by going into the SCI Stores (national information repositories) for the individual health boards. But the big advantages of the regional portal are that you don’t have to manage so many passwords and you can find additional information, such as clinical correspondence. It really is very useful.”

David Dougan, programme manager, said: “We have taken a simple approach. So, for example, if a Greater Glasgow and Clyde clinician has a patient in front of them, there is an optional tab within the Greater Glasgow and Clyde portal called ‘Regional Portals’.

“If they click that, they are presented with an overview page, on which there are links to all the other health board portals they can access. If they select one of those links, it opens the portal and passes over the CHI Number (the Scottish national patient identifier) to search for a match.

“If there is a match, then the clinician can see the further information that is available for that patient. In the background, it also sends over the user’s details, so there is an audit log of use.”