A single child health information system spanning the whole of South West England from South Gloucester to the Isles of Scilly, has successfully gone live – on time and to a tight schedule. 

The unified system manages active electronic records for nearly 710,000 children, logging the health status of individual children and the population at large, checking interventions and ensuring that none of them are duplicated or missed. It is based on System C’s market-leading CarePlus child health software.

System C won the contract in partnership with Health Intelligence last year, when NHS England South West tendered for a single system spanning the entire geographic footprint – covering South Gloucestershire, Bristol, North Somerset, Somerset, Devon, Torbay, Plymouth, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. A key part of the rationale was to create a seamless region-wide service, making it easier to prevent children falling through gaps and to keep track of movements both within and in and out of the area.

The go-live has involved combining records and services across five CCGs, nine local authorities, 10 acute hospitals and 376 general practices. 

The programme was delivered in two stages. In July this year the records of 150,000 children living in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly were migrated from a RiO system into the existing Devon CarePlus environment.

The second stage in the go-live has just been completed successfully, with 798,000 records for children living in Bristol, North Somerset, Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSSG) being successfully migrated across, creating a single South West instance of CarePlus.  

There were nearly 26,000 duplicate records in this final migration, and these have all been successfully merged to ensure there is a single composite record for each child in the South West.

James Bolt, head of public health commissioning at NHS England South West, commented:

We are delighted to have gone live with CarePlus.  Having a single system across the whole region is going to make a big difference to the efficiency and effectiveness with which health professionals can manage queries about children in the area.  The result will be safer and more joined up care.

System C’s CarePlus software records key information such as immunisations and vaccinations from birth to 19 years, and allows clinicians and administrators to track children through their pre-school and school years as well as supporting specialist groups such as Sure Start. It has a comprehensive range of fully-integrated modules, supporting the Healthy Child Programme (HCP).

It is a complex solution which integrates with many other systems and services including schools, maternity providers, blood spot screening laboratories, health visitor teams and newborn hearing programme providers.

The procurement called for a solution that was compliant with the national framework and specification for child health information systems issued by the Department of Health and CarePlus is 97% compliant with that specification.