Whittington Health Integrated Care Organisation and Helicon Health have been successful in winning a joint bid for a grant from NHS England’s Integrated Digital Care Fund.
The grant will be used to improve the interoperability of HeliconHeart, Helicon Health’s web based package of services for patients with cardiovascular disease. Whittington Health has been using HeliconHeart and its predecessor for 8 years to connect hospital clinicians, GPs and community pharmacists and enhance support for patients on oral anticoagulants. The grant will also be used to roll out a module for atrial fibrillation and stroke prevention.
The project will focus on connecting HeliconHeart to hospital and GP systems such as diagnostic labs and patient administration systems, using the NHS standard messaging (the ITK toolbox) and open source approaches. As the module that will result from this project aims to enhance support for patients with long-term conditions, it is called ‘openLTC’.
The NHS England ‘Integrated Digital Care’ Technology Fund, (previously called ‘Safer Hospitals, safer wards’), launched in May 2013. It is a key enabler of the NHS vision for a “fully integrated digital patient record across all care settings by 2018”.
David Patterson, chief executive, Helicon Health said:
“Fully integrated digital care requires fit-for-purpose collaboration tools to assist the flow of information between healthcare professionals and their patients. However, with so many legacy systems across the NHS, compatibility is a problem. Our standards based system is already designed to be interoperable but this project is a critical next step to maximize the interoperability we can offer. Our existing relationship with Whittington Health makes them an ideal partner for this project and we look forward to releasing the new module early in 2015.”
Further information:
Please email David Patterson
