Our practice uses a secure electronic health records system called SystmOne. With your permission, this system can allow us to share your full health record held here with other healthcare services which provide care for you. These other services will also ask your permission to view your record.

Many organisations locally use (or are planning to use) SystmOne. This includes many GP practices, clinics, community services and hospitals. Sharing your health record will help us all to deliver the best level of care for you, because, wherever you go, the doctors and nurses will be able to see what has already happened to you, the medicines you are on and what you are allergic to. It’s a much safer way to carry out healthcare.

When you ‘share your record’ you actually share the notes we have made about you into a central ‘pool’ of information about yourself.
Sharing OUT – this controls whether your information recorded at a practice or clinic can be shared out into your ‘pool’ (but no-one else can see it yet.)
Sharing IN – this controls whether or not other specific healthcare staff caring for you — say, at a clinic — can view the information in your ‘pool’ and thus see important medical information about you.

Let’s take an example:

Mrs Smith visits her GP. She gives consent for him to share out her primary care information into the pool, and gives permission for him to share in information currently in the pool.
A month later she ends up in a casualty department which is using SystmOne: she gives them permission to share in – which means that the casualty staff can now see the GP record (which is now in the ‘pool’); she also gives casualty permission to share out – which means that observations, tests and X-ray results made in casualty are now added to her ‘pool’, so that when she goes back to her GP he will be able to view the notes that the casualty staff made about her.
Then she goes to a stop smoking clinic. However, she doesn’t really want this clinic to see all the intimate details about her past history of depression, so she refuses consent for the smoking clinic to share in from her ‘pool’. Therefore, that clinic can’t see any of her pooled information – not from the GP notes, nor from the casualty visit. On the other hand, she is quite happy for the stop smoking clinic’s notes to be seen by her other healthcare workers, so she gives the stop smoking clinic permission to share out.

We think that this is a great way to share information safely between healthcare workers! You only share what you are comfortable with, and you are totally in control of who is allowed to view the information in your pool.

(Two important notes: You can also request individual entries in your record to be marked as ‘Private’. These are never put into your ‘pool’ even if you choose to share out. Also, sharing under this system is entirely separate from sharing your information via the Summary Care Record, or via care data, which has been in the news recently. Our system only shares information with specific healthcare providers that you nominate, and we are very happy with this.)

We hope you will agree to share in and share out. We think it will make life safer for you, minimise delays — for example, in finding out the results of tests — and make it easier for us to deliver high-quality care to you safely and effectively. (And whatever choices you make, you can change them whenever you want. You can always say ‘No’ — at any time you wish.) We would like you to choose to share your medical information both out and in, for maximum benefit to you.