How Are Shared Care Records Becoming a Reality in London? (Gary McAllister)
OneLondon is a project that supports a vision of joined-up health and care. It is a pan-London collaboration between leaders from the 5 Integrated Care Systems in the capital. London’s healthcare system is complex. It covers a population of 10 million people and is connecting 35 NHS Trusts and 1385 GP practices.
In this episode, Gary McAllister, Chief Technology Officer of OneLondon explains how is London approaching the digital transformation of healthcare in London, how complex is the IT infrastructure at the moment, and how the core team of OneLondon works with vendors to try to connect different systems as efficiently as possible.
Tune in to the full episode:
Some questions addressed:
You were Chief Platform Architect and CTO for Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, before becoming the CTO of One London in 2020. For starters - can you offer a reflection on the different roles you had and how they’ve helped you in your current position?
One London project serves a population of 10 million people. The aim of One London is to connect health and care providers to enable citizens to have a single care record. This is a huge undertaking because 40 NHS Trusts and 1400 healthcare providers need to be connected. Can we clarify what exactly has been done so far - what has connected already and what perhaps not yet, and what’s the plan in the upcoming years?
There are nine demonstrator projects happening under the OneLondon umbrella - urgent and end-of-life care, diagnostics, radiology and pathology diagnostics, stroke prevention and improving health in London, among other areas. How far are these projects?
One London is just one of many single care records projects in the UK - they all fall under the Local Health Care Records Exemplars project started by NHS England in 2018. Other exemplar cities are Manchester, Yorkshire and Humber, Wessex, and Thames Valley and Surrey. How does the collaboration differ between regions?
OneLondon urgent care planning went live end of July. What is the feedback you are getting since the launch?
How many vendors are included in the consolidation of Londoners' records?
Organizations across London are connected to provide an accurate, complete picture of a person’s health and care over time. As a brief introduction: can you offer a reflection on how this project was planned in its initial stages? How many institutions are connected to the London Care Record now?
You’ve been running OneLondon since 2018. Can you describe the complexity of the project: How many partnerships had to be formed, and how many vendors were included to make this a reality? How many healthcare providers are connected?
What’s the role of data standards in this whole undertaking?
Similar population-wide digital infrastructure projects are seen across the world - most European countries have some form of a personal health record, Australia implemented a national My Health Record, etc. How would you describe OneLondon compared to these national infrastructure projects? How does it differ in terms of the technical requirements and difficulty of getting all needed stakeholders aboard so patients are not subjected to “luck” meaning that their healthcare provider just isn’t in the network?
The European Health Data Space aspires to reach cross-border connectivity. How do you see the ambition of this plan with the experiences in One London?
This is what we see in various projects - sometimes, there’ll be a healthcare provider that simply won’t push patient documents/discharge letters to the central repository/backbone/platform; hence the patient’s record will be incomplete. In essence: can all patients in OneLondon be rested assured their care plan is really available to other healthcare providers?
More about OneLondon: https://www.onelondon.online/
More about Urgent Care Planning: https://ucp.onelondon.online/
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