Evaluation Of CityEHR Toolkit Through Development Of An Open ...

Naveed Dogar
charity is very involved with this clinic, but they don’t have much power over this
particular project, mainly because there isn’t a great deal of funding required. GPs and
external physiotherapists are not deeply interested in the way things are done at the
clinic - as long as their patients get seen and treated properly, they are satisfied. They
are concerned with the overall outcome, regardless of how the result is achieved.
2.10 Compliance:
While developing the clinical system, we must ensure that we comply with the data
protection act, and more specifically the Caldicott principles. These are six
requirements that the healthcare provider must meet in order to process patient
data[40]. The existing workflow will be altered, and new information (which was not
previously collected) will be recorded, this patient information must conform to the
stated principles. These include principles such as ‘the purpose for the collected
patient information must be justified’ and ‘the minimum necessary patient-identifiable
information is to be used’. Appendix A lists the six principles.
In regards to the ‘Ponseti Portal’, the purpose is definitely justified. The
information needs to be recorded for the patient’s and the clinic’s best interest. A
rigorous record files all encounters that can be instantly retrieved and the relevant
history reviewed. Introducing an EHR minimises chances of making errors while
recording patient information, which could later have serious implications, i.e.
administrating conflicting medication. Only absolutely necessary patient identifiable
information is going to be used, there is no data being recorded on the system that is
not needed and we are not recording data for ‘just in case we need it’ scenarios. Having
a secure login process that only allows authentic users protects patients’
confidentiality. Further authorisation ensures that information is accessed on strict
need-to-know bases. One of the requirements from this project is to have a built in
teaching mode, this will also act as a wall between the trainee and real patient data.
This area will look exactly like the real system, but will only have dummy data (along
with information pages). This system is being designed for tablet devices that can
easily ‘go missing’; one must always have an eye out for the device and who is using it.
The person in-charge of the clinic has the ultimate responsibility for data protection.
They must familiarise themselves with the data protection law and do everything in
their power to protect confidential information.
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