Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust is working with Access HSC to integrate the company’s Rio EPR (electronic patient record) and Elemental social prescribing software.
The company said that once the integration is complete it will enable over 700 mental health professionals across Merseyside to refer patients to social prescribing services provided by The Life Rooms – a local organisation to support physical and mental wellbeing – directly through the EPR.
The Life Rooms, which is managed by Mersey Care, operates from three main locations and 20 mobile sites to provide specialist social prescribing support, advice and community opportunities to anyone who needs it.
Its service lead and head of integration, Gary Thorpe, said: “In any clinical journey, there are points where people need additional social support. The idea of merging these two pathways will be brought to life by the Rio EPR-Elemental integration as we roll it out across six major boroughs.
“Our intention is to connect hundreds of clinicians so that they are able to refer with assurance that another specialist NHS service, The Life Rooms, is providing the right services to support people who need both clinical and social support.”
Time saving
Many of Mersey Care’s mental health clinicians are currently spending a significant amount of time each day prescribing social support, which potentially has an impact on the number of clinical interventions that they can deliver.
Access HSC said the Rio EPR-Elemental integration will be significantly reduce the time need for prescribing and free up clinical time by approximately 20%. This is expected to help reduce the backlog in mental health services.
Lyndsay Thompson, Mersey Care’s operational manager, said: “We hope the Rio EPR-Elemental integration will give clinicians the missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to linking our services directly with social prescribing activities, and in turn see how these can help patients.”
The trust will be the first to trial the integration across early intervention, community mental health and crisis teams. It has been using the Rio EPR system since 2015 and Elemental software since 2016.
