Core and QuickFHIR beyond Covid – learning from the pandemic for a better future

An army of volunteers took the fight to Covid last year, jabbing over 130 million British arms and saving us from another Christmas lockdown. Alongside the frontline NHS heroes, their tireless work helped us dare to dream that 2022 might finally be the year we can unlock – and stay unlocked.

Black Pear was also busy laying foundations. We enter the New Year with a skip in our step having bolstered the team with a string of top recruits who hit the ground running on our own big rollouts. Now as we look forward to life after lockdown, we are ready to help revolutionise healthcare integration and shift what is possible.

Here’s a quick look back on what we were up to last year, and what we have planned for 2022 and beyond:

• QuickFHIR went live and fully integrated a remote patient monitoring app with primary care systems a year earlier than they thought possible. Our most exciting new bit of kit sees us able to set up a development cell for you in hours so you can test out your solution and roll out to market in weeks. Smart devices and the pandemic have seen an explosion in remote monitoring apps as well as digital triage systems, telemedicine and more, but getting them to write back into care records is costly and time consuming. It means huge silos of data have been created which sit separately from current records forcing clinicians to log into yet more systems to access this information. QuickFHIR cuts through that, converting primary care data into FHIR R4 bundles which allow any FHIR-enabled system to fully integrate using read and writeback capabilities with all major primary care networks simply, easily and affordably. It means patients can be treated where they want while their clinicians are more informed than ever.

• Core Appointments helped a Telemedicine company take the strain off GPs with smart workflows which update their patients’ information quickly and simply. Rather than appointment outcomes having to be manually entered into a patient record, it automatically sends them directly into the patient record. This is ready for the local GP to access just hours after the appointment has been completed. It means practices can focus on the most pressing issues while ensuring the needs of patients are met.

• Core Care Record continued to break down geographical barriers by linking up services from different regions using different care records. It allows providers to share all their existing information rather than creating a unified dataset from scratch because it harnesses HL7 FHIR®. Last year this saw the Somerset Integrated Digital e-Record (SIDeR) link up all its partners from acute and community hospitals and hospices to GP practices, adult care, and even the council systems. That netted Black Pear EMIS’ Partner of the Year award. Looking forward it will see SIDeR link up with Bristol’s integrated care record, Connecting Care, as a blueprint for enhanced multidisciplinary approaches everywhere.

• Core Care Plans continued to be piloted and rolled out across the country with plans for end of life, diabetes, mental health services, social prescribing and more. We also saw our plans link up with Core Care Record, a big milestone as we push to give clinicians the most information in the simplest form possible. Looking forward, this will be a big year as we roll out CoreX – a huge step in integration. All types of plans will ultimately become interoperable, updating one another with automatic alerts to every relevant person. Users will also get a role-based access, to make their view even more tailored than ever before. It will also allow patients to get a view via the NHS App.

At Black Pear we believe in collaboration to deliver the change the health service needs and last year would not have been possible without the help of our amazing partners. In particular, we are able to leverage our FHIR expertise and technology by working alongside Amazon Web Services and EMIS. As we look into the New Year we know these partnerships will be vital in pushing our solutions to the next level as we move into new areas including risk stratification and FHIR repositories as well as more work on patient engagement and care.

Away from the coalface, 2021 also saw us bring our partners together for the second ever Pear Fest which raised over £2,500 for Hospice UK. After too long being restricted from seeing loved ones, it was a glimpse of the old life and a reminder of what’s really important. So here’s to 2022, and many more nights that make life worth living.