More health records have been included and now allergy information from University Hospitals Dorset NHS Foundation Trust (formerly Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals (RBCH) and Poole Hospital (PH) will be available to health and social care professionals using the DCR. This will enable hospital teams to prescribe medications more safely to patients.

University Hospitals Dorset have also added clinic letters and electronic inpatient and emergency discharge summaries into the DCR, which will provide clear advice to GPs and social care teams helping to provide ongoing care to patients.

The new feeds from the acute hospitals follows the successful introduction of children’s demographics information from Dorset Council. All of the local authority’s adult and children’s records are now available through the DCR.

Senior reporting officer for the DCR and director of informatics at University Hospitals Dorset, Peter Gill, said the new feeds were evidence of growing integrated care across the county.

“I’m really pleased with the additional feeds entering the DCR. Greater integration across our health and social care settings brings coordinated and safer care for people of Dorset and a greater understanding among professionals of the treatment required for them. Data really does save lives.”

The software powering the DCR is supplied by Orion Health. Orion Health general manager for Great Britain and Ireland, Gary Birks, also commented on this expansion of the information available, saying, “Since its initial go-live in 2018, the DCR has steadily built out the information available within it and become increasingly useful to its users. This is reflected in the growth from 2,200 records accessed in July 2019 to over 14,000 last month. We look forward to supporting the DCR’s busy roadmap of upcoming additions to data and functionality, all in the interest of improved patient care.”

At present, nearly 2,000 trained health and social care professionals across the partnership, which includes the county’s three acute hospitals, Dorset HealthCare, Dorset Clinical Commissioning Group and the two local authorities, can use the DCR. All the county’s GP practices are connected to the DCR.

Earlier this year, in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic, Yeovil District Hospital and community pharmacists in Dorset were also given access to the DCR. It is hoped that, as the phased rollout progresses, active users will grow to around 7,000.