Cerner, a global leader in health care, has announced that Wirral Partners, an integrated primary and acute care system in the United Kingdom, will use Cerner's HealtheIntent℠ population health management platform to advance the Healthy Wirral program, an initiative focused on establishing new models of care for disease management and prevention.
HealtheIntent, a system-agnostic, near real-time platform, enables organisations to aggregate health data from multiple sources into a single record to support new models of care. The platform enables care providers to access health records anywhere, anytime to proactively engage patients and manage disease and help prevent illness. Wirral Partners through Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is Cerner's first global HealtheIntent client.
Wirral Partners is embarking on a high-profile public insight and engagement program to involve their community of 330,000 citizens to raise awareness of the program and to actively engage individuals.
"Healthy Wirral is a new approach to the way services are planned and commissioned on Wirral. With an unacceptable difference in life expectancy of up to 10 years for females and 12.4 years for males, depending on where a person lives in Wirral, this challenge has never been more real and it is recognised that the current model of care delivery is clinically and financially unsustainable," said Jon Develing, executive lead for the Healthy Wirral program. "Wirral Partners are passionate about improving the health and well-being of local people and are developing a new model of integrated care that provides holistic assessment and intervention to meet the health and social care needs of local people. We believe this model will be further enhanced by informatics-enabled population health management. And we're really excited about presenting the system to our community and listening to their views on how we can really make it work for our patients."
In October 2014, NHS England published the Five Year Forward View, which described that there had been changes in patients’ health needs and personal preferences and that long-term health conditions were now taking 70 percent of the health service budget. The strategy calls for a radical change to the care delivery models in England, with integration of care providers to take accountability for population health at the local level. At the same time, they recognized that many people wished to be more informed and involved with their own care, challenging the traditional divide between patients and professionals and offering opportunities for better health through increased prevention and supported self-care. It also recognized that changes in technology are transforming the ability to predict, diagnose and treat disease.
In March 2015, NHS England announced the first 29 vanguard sites, and Healthy Wirral was selected as a New Care Model Vanguard.
"Wirral hospital has used information and technology to improve health care for a generation, so it's only to be expected that the NHS would select Wirral Partners to help improve the health of the population," said Matthew Swindells, senior vice president, population health and global strategy, Cerner. "What happens at Wirral in the coming months can be followed and replicated around the country. Cerner will support Wirral Partners through the process and leverage our years of experience implementing solutions around the world to deliver the benefits that this ambitious and innovative program can achieve."
"The development of a single care record will enable those who provide care to have good access to all appropriate health and social care information," said Dr. Sue Wells, medical director at Wirral Clinical Commissioning Group. "This can help lead to better, safer and more efficient care and will allow local clinicians to identify gaps in the care and direct people to appropriate interventions, leading to better outcomes."
"Cerner and the Wirral region have a strong existing relationship and this contract marks a new beginning for the Wirral peninsula moving to a population health management approach," said Dr. Justin Whatling, vice president, population health, Cerner Europe. "Building on our support for 85 unique HealtheIntent clients in the USA, which includes outcomes-based accountable care organisations, we are delighted that Wirral Partners will be the first in the UK to leverage this new informatics approach. To improve population health requires us to do this one person at a time; IT is a key enabler for health and care staff to develop new integrated care models to proactively engage citizens in their health and wellbeing."