Transfer of Care - Acute Inpatient Discharge Standard
Summary
- Information standards
- Technical standards and specifications
- NHS Acute Trusts providing ordinary and day case admissions.
- Independent providers of ordinary/day case admissions in NHS secondary care.
- Continuity of care
- Key care information
- Messaging
Documentation
This information standard presents a combined product which aims to improve patient care through the digital transfer of structured inpatient and day case discharge documents from secondary care to GP practices.
This is achieved through bringing together multiple components (“layers”) to support the recording of information and the onward transmission to, and receipt by, GP IT systems.
These layers are:
- Clinical: use of the Professional Record Standards Body (PRSB) eDischarge standard as the underlying information model (at release 2.1).
- Terminology: alignment with the national information standards SCCI0034 SNOMED CT and SCCI0052 Dictionary of medicines and devices (dm+d).
- Technology and representation: use of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) profiles to pull together the structured information required to send to the GP IT system.
- Transport: use of the Message Exchange for Social Care and Health (MESH) for the transmission of the FHIR representation to the GP IT system.
The standard helps to achieve the ambitions of the NHS Digital Transfer of Care initiative and is the first in a series of standards to be released over the coming months (covering emergency care, mental health and outpatient settings). While the Transfer of Care initiative has been mandated by the NHS Standard Contract, it has only lately been possible for all GP IT systems to successfully receive the discharge correspondence through this initiative.