Integrated Care Record
The primary goals and objectives of the Integrated Care Record initiative focus on fostering better care coordination, enabling integrated care delivery across health and social care services, and ultimately enhancing patient and service user outcomes. By providing a unified view of patient and service user information, the Integrated Care Record will facilitate seamless collaboration among health and social care professionals, ensuring that accurate, up-to-date data is accessible when and where it’s needed. This integration reduces the risk of errors, minimises duplicate assessments, and supports informed decision-making, leading to more efficient and effective care.
Additionally, it has the potential to empower patients and service users by enabling them to actively participate in their own health management, improving their overall health and wellbeing outcomes, and experience and satisfaction with care services.
This project will implement a Integrated Care Record for Wales with a view of integrating data and making it available across all health and care settings, replacing the current integrated care functionality provided by the CareDirector system for existing users and encompassing all relevant health and social care services across Wales.
The Vision of an Integrated Care Record
To create a connected health and social care ecosystem where patient and service user data flows freely, securely and accurately between health and social care providers, empowering patients service users and clinicians to make informed decisions, improving patient and service user outcomes, and enhancing health and social care system efficiency.
Rebranding to the Integrated Care Record
When this project began, it was referred to as a Shared Care Record, this reflected the core goals of the initiative. As our discovery phase has progressed, we have sought to expand and clarify the aims and scope of the project, differentiating it from other initiatives undertaking similar work. Changing the name of a Shared Care Record Programme to an Integrated Care Record (ICR) Programme has several benefits, particularly in how the programme is perceived and aligned with broader healthcare goals.
Emphasises Broader Scope
Integrated Care Record highlights a more holistic approach, encompassing not just data sharing but also the integration of services, processes, and workflows across a wider range of care settings (e.g., social care, community care, mental health, and voluntary sectors).
Clarity of Purpose for Stakeholders
The name Integrated Care Record provides a clearer signal to stakeholders, including patients, service users, providers, and commissioners, that the programme aims to support comprehensive, person-centred care.
Patient-Centric Focus
For patients and service users, Integrated Care suggests a unified, continuous care experience, which can improve understanding and trust in the programme.
Encourages Collaborative Ownership
Integrated Care Record promotes a sense of collective ownership and responsibility among all participating organisations, fostering collaboration.
Scope
The programme will start by developing core capabilities and reusable technical data structures to integrate care across settings such as social care, community health, mental health, acute care, primary care, and care homes. The primary goal is to create a scalable integration infrastructure that supports all care settings. The implementation of integrated care will follow a use case-by-use case approach, ensuring that tangible outcomes are achieved gradually on a case-by-case basis (through the development of business cases). By adopting an agile approach, stakeholders can begin benefiting from usable features early in the process, while further developments are built on a solid foundation.
This integration infrastructure will be designed to be extensible, allowing it to adapt to the needs of various care settings. It will include the necessary terminologies, semantics, and interoperability standards to ensure smooth integration. The initial phase will focus on delivering core capabilities and up to two use cases, resulting in a functional shared care record. This proof of concept will then be expanded to additional use cases across partner organisations. This flexible and scalable model mirrors the successful strategies used in other integrated care record programmes.
The programme will use existing national and assurance process, such as the Welsh Information Standards Board, to ensure a process of consultation with all key stakeholders, who will be responsible, accountable, consulted and informed for decisions on national data standards and specifications that will underpin our shared care record approach in future.
Next steps
We have already initiated an initial round of Discovery and Engagement with key stakeholders we plan to collaborate with. In the new year, we will begin the market engagement phase of the Discovery work.