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Patient records to go digital before study end
Health authorities are pushing through a project to centralised medical records before the completition of a study on its impact
The Department of Health has spent more than £700,000 on a project to study the impact of introducing centralised medical records — but is pushing ahead with the project before the study has even been completed.
Health authorities in most areas of England are currently preparing to create Summary Care Records (SCR) — electronic records of a person's allergies and drug prescriptions stored on a central database.
Strategic Health Authorities across England have been given until March of next year to begin creating SCRs for patients, with the first SCRs in the national rollout going live in London last November.
For more on this story, see Patient-records project ploughs on - but its £700,000 evaluation isn't finished yet on silicon.com.