- Smart Healthcare, Monday 11 January 2010 11.40 GMT
The Welsh Clinical Portal, a secure system which will draw patient information from a variety of legacy systems and databases across the Welsh health service, will be developed with £2.5m from the Welsh Assembly Government, Hart said on 8 January 2010.
Informing Healthcare, the Welsh NHS IT organisation, said the portal will bring together information which health professionals use on a day to day basis. It is has undergone a pilot phase in West Wales General Hospital in Carmarthen.
Health care organisations in Wales currently have separate systems to deal with information such as test results, referrals and administration details. These systems rarely communicate with each other, leading to staff using different computer systems and paper records.
The portal aims to provide fast access to information about patient care, to reduce reliance on paper records and ultimately to improve patient safety, according to Informing Healthcare.
It also aims to gives doctors and nurses a personalised workspace with access to their own patient lists. The organisation said that healthcare staff will be able to log on at terminals anywhere in a hospital and view patient records and results.
"Getting to the final product will be a step-by-step process. As each stage of the design and development is completed it will be rolled out across Wales so any lessons can be learned and acted on, and the benefits seen quickly," said Hart.
A spokesperson for Informing Healthcare told Smart Healthcare: "It is an incremental project and we are working in West Wales and with all the health boards to create implementation plans. A lot will depend on their own resources, but we are hoping for implementation plans to be completed by the end of March."
Wales is also introducing My Health Online, to provide patients with electronic access to their records, and Individual Health Records, a limited set of data drawn from GP systems for emergency use, similar to Scotland's Emergency Care Summary. The latter is already in use in Gwent.
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