System C’s CarePlus child health system is the first system to connect to the groundbreaking new National Events Management Service, launched by NHS England and NHS Digital to support child health information being available digitally to health professionals and parents at the point of care.

System C achieved the CarePlus integration using nationally-approved UK FHIR standards, part of the wider System C & Graphnet Care Alliance FHIR strategy announced in September last year. 

The National Events Management Service has initially launched in North East London in partnership with North East London Foundation Trust, which provides a child health information service across 12 CCGs and health visiting services for 4 CCGs.

The facility enables parents and health professionals to securely share Healthy Child Programme information from the same sources at the same time via System C’s CarePlus system and other supplier systems.

The National Events Management Service pushes out automated notifications of births, changes of address and GP practices to make sure that care services know where every child is, the first system to use the Personal Demographics Service to do this. It ensures that all involved in the care of children have appropriate access to information such as which preventive interventions a child has received, in order to improve the speed of diagnosis and treatment.

The child health data is built around new information standards for the Healthy Child Programme released by the Professional Records Standards Body last year, a key step in providing much needed interoperability between systems.

System C will now be rolling out the NEMS functionality to all its CarePlus customers. CarePlus is a market-leading child health system, holding records on over six million children and used at a population level over large geographical areas such as Greater London and the West Midlands.

Umesh Gadhvi, director of health informatics at North East London Foundation Trust, said:

Connecting to this new national service is a great opportunity to bring the benefits of standardised and rapidly transferred information to our health visitors and the families they work with. For new parents, having up-to-date health guidance and information on their child in their hand through the new digital red book service is a great step forward.

When CarePlus was initially linked with the new service in North East London the system instantly received over 100 notifications of changes. The number of changes continued to increase through the day as more interactions were taking place on the Personal Demographics Service and by mid-afternoon over 1800 registration changes had been received. The system is now getting on average 2,500+ notifications per day.

The scope of the National Events Management Service will evolve over time, working in conjunction with other local and national services, to support the whole of the Healthy Child Programme pathway and the availability of NHS-held clinical information to parents via digital red books.

Martin Dennys, programme manager for Digital Child Health in NHS Digital, commented:

Child health information is currently held across a number of different information systems across the UK. The National Events Management Service supports the communication between these systems and is an important milestone in the journey to deliver more personalised, responsive and integrated services to families and children. We now look forward to supporting suppliers in rolling the service out more widely.

Beverley Bryant, chief operating officer for the System C & Graphnet Care Alliance, said

We are really pleased to be involved in such an important step in the development of the Healthy Child programme. This project is a great example of how interoperability helps improve care. System C is committed to open APIs and are adopting the FHIR interfacing standard precisely to make possible the sharing of health and care information nationally which this project delivers.