A Bradford health trust has completed the first phase of a project to enable the electronic sharing of patient information between GPs and community care and mental health services.

Bradford District Care Trust (BDCT) is celebrating the first milestone in its Healthy Ambitions initiative to provide a single point of access for GPs and clinicians.

The Trust has more than 3,000 staff and provides services for adult mental health, older people’s services, forensics, child and adolescent mental health service, drug and alcohol misuse, learning disabilities, adult community nursing, allied health professionals, children's services, substance misuse and primary care mental health.

Currently patient information is shared between GPs and the Trust through paper-based referrals and discharge letters. GPs create a patient referral which is entered into their practice system, sent via fax or post to BDCT, where it is manually typed into the Trust’s electronic medical record system.

Patient discharge letters are similarly printed on paper at BDCT and sent back to the GPs by post or fax to be manually scanned into their practice systems. This process was assessed as presenting several risks to BDCT, including an inability to deliver effective care to service users, increased clinical risks, inconsistent data quality and loss of data in transit.

Phase one of the Healthy Ambitions initiative, which enables basic transactional integration, has passed the testing phase and is set to go live next month.

Phase two will provide read-only access to primary care records for staff at the Trust and phase three aims to deliver integration for all single-point-of-access services for registrations, referrals, admissions, discharges and transfers.

The final phase will aim to deliver full integration between BDCT's two major clinical systems to deliver the objectives of the Trust transformational programme.

Tony Middleton, head of informatics at BDCT said: “Our main targets for this project are to reduce the risk associated with manual input of patient data from one system to another and avoid duplication of effort in the process.

“It is our intention to provide GPs and clinicians with a single point of access to patient records and ultimately improve the patient experience at the same time.”