London Programme for IT

West London cleans up ready for go-live

West London Mental Health Trust (WLMHT) went live with the NHS Care Records Service (NHS CRS) mental health system, also known as RiO. Ade Popoola, Data Warehouse Architect at WLMHT, told Next Generation how the trust used a new, free service to increase the number of patient records with NHS numbers. Trusts must attain targets on NHS numbers in order to go-live. This massively reduces the risk of patient misidentification and ensures that each patient has just one record, ready to give the right information in an emergency...

The aim of the NHS CRS is to make important information such as medications and allergies available in an emergency, so good record keeping is crucial. The NHS number is a unique way to identify our patients.

Helping attain targets

The NHS's quality standard requires that 95% of active and 100% of inactive patient records have a verified NHS number before trusts can move them on to their new NHS CRS system. Some trusts and PCTs have found it particularly difficult to obtain verified NHS numbers using the NHS Strategic Tracing Service (NSTS) for certain types of records, including those who have ‘left' the NHS, like military personnel or prisoners. To support trusts, NHS Connecting for Health set up the Migration Analysis Cleansing Service (MACS).

"When we began our implementation of the NHS CRS mental health system, we had NHS numbers for 71% of our patients," says Ade Popoola, "To try and meet the target of 95% of active patients with NHS numbers we decided to use the MACS."

In fact, the trust was keen to move all their patient records into the new system, not just those currently active, which meant even more records to properly identify.

"We heard that the MACS held more detailed information, particularly historic data not held on NSTS", says Ade.

Easy to use service

Initially the trust sent information to the Migration Analysis Cleansing Service on floppy discs and CD ROMS. They received a response from MACS within three days. Ade then found that he could submit the information via NHSmail – the secure NHS email service – which made the process even easier.

"It was quite straight forward," he says, "I sent off the demographic details like name, address and date of birth, and then the MACS returned the file with NHS numbers attached. The main benefit though, was the analysis performed on the unmatched data which was provided to us as reports. The reports identified certain trends and underlying issues with data quality. This helped us to develop new processes when registering patients, which improved our rate of NHS number matching."

These reports supported WLMHT in developing their data quality improvement plan. They identified areas where the basic registration processes could be improved, eg. surname/forename management, date of birth management and death notifications. The reports may also highlight areas where refresher training is needed to improve data collection. In total WLMHT sent 134,091 records to the MACS, 92,387 (69%) of these have been successfully traced.

Help for trusts across London

Ade says: "I would recommend to other trusts that they start the tracing process at least six months before go-live to ensure that they reach 95%, well in advance of switching on their new system. We were successful, but I wish we had started earlier."

"I would thoroughly recommend the MACS to all London NHS organisations," says Rae Long, Information Quality Assurance Programme (IQAP) lead for London. "It is free to trusts and PCTs preparing to install an NHS CRS system. To date out of the 3,372,761 records processed for London's NHS, 1,879,104 (56%) have been successfully traced by the MACS."

For further information contact Rae Long, on 07900 240164 or Rae.Long@nhs.net, to discuss when your organisation can make use of the MACS. For more information about Data Quality and IQAP please visit the web page: http://www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/technical/standards/dataquality/