The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) has announced deals with a group of suppliers to develop a health and social care digital platform for the city.
It is working on the programme with Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership (GMHSCP) and the Salford Royal Northern NHS Foundation Trust, as part of NHS England’s national Local Health and Care Record transformation programme. It involves a total £14.3 million investment in new technologies for joining up data from different systems.
The deals include an agreement with Civica for the development of an Enterprise Master Patient Index for the secure attachment of information shared between systems to the correct person’s records.
Philips Forcare has been selected to develop a Record Locator Service, which will enable different systems to find and retrieve records relevant to an individual in different care settings.
Objectivity has been appointed to produce a citizen app based on the Mendix low code platform.
ANS has been chosen to provide cloud consultancy and services to the programme as part of the ‘cloud first’ approach to deployment. GMCA said this will help to deliver a secure platform hosting all the software providers’ services from deployment stage to production.
Accenture has also been appointed to provide additional programme assurance and to support the design, configuration and testing of solutions.
GMCA also highlighted an earlier deal with Graphnet under which its Care Centric system is supporting the sharing of patient records.
Development priorities
The city region’s authorities have plans to develop a suite of products to support effective information sharing in the health and social care sector. GMCA indicated in September that the first initiatives will focus on dementia, frailty and health visiting.
Councillor Elise Wilson, portfolio lead for Digital City Region programme at GMCA, said: “This is a game changing initiative for the people of Greater Manchester and the digital capabilities we are creating have the potential to be reused to improve many other public services too.
“It shows what a joint effort can achieve when public services come together with a strong focus on the people they support.”
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