Since July 2010, the NHS Cumbria has been piloting a web system which allows community health staff to access patient records via electronic means while visiting patients in remote Cumbrian villages (North West England).

NHS Cumbria pilots a primary care software developer's system to share patient records from 13 General Practitioners (GP) practices serving 75 000 patients with the community health teams. The 'mobile clinicians', equipped with netbooks, are able to view a summary of the patient records during home consultations.

The system holds patients' medical records in a central database rather than on local servers. New information is updated in real-time, via 'streaming' from the local site to the data centre. As the most detailed patient record, the GP record is at the centre of the system. Subject to local data sharing agreements, other practitioners - e.g. community health teams - can access relevant information from the GP record and record their own interactions with the patient, using customised templates.

The clinical teams in South Lakeland (southern area of Cumbria) currently using the electronic system in question are listed here:

• Respiratory team;
• Out-of-hours GPs;
• Long-term condition nurses;
• Chiropodists and podiatrists working in the South Lakeland locality;
• Community physiotherapists;
• District nurses;
• Primary care assessment service.

Out-of-hours GPs and the Primary Care Trust's (PCT's) assessment service - a GP-led team which prevents unnecessary hospital admissions - are also benefiting, through interoperability between this web system and another system they currently use.

NHS Cumbria's South Lakeland locality is one of 16 Integrated Care Pilots of the Department of Health.

Further information:

• Original news article - British Journal of Healthcare Computing and Information Management
• Related article - EMIS
• Integrated Care Pilots of the Department of Health
• NHS Cumbria