Covid, Care Plans and QuickFHIR – a year in review

Last year will go down as the most challenging in the history of the NHS as frontline staff got to grips with the new normal. Thousands of health and care workers switched to remote working overnight to allow those looking after virus patients to have the run of hastily erected Covid hot clinics; no mean feat considering our health service is the fifth biggest employer on the planet.

At Black Pear we were in a unique position to help as everything we do is geared towards giving clinicians the information they need no matter where or when they need it. And as millions of Brits get the vaccine this means we can help give the NHS a shot in the arm to build back better. Here’s a quick look at how we were able to help our frontline heroes in 2020, and what we have planned for 2021.

Covid response

• Care Records allowed doctors working from home to access the systems they needed. It gives them live access to patients’ GP records irrespective of the clinical system they are stored on. It was also used to provide GP records for Covid hot clinics.
• Core Appointments was rapidly updated to give ambulance services enhanced abilities to increase capacity for remote GP appointments. It streamlines all primary services into one live appointment book. This helped the switch to online working and let doctors and 111 call handlers book virus patients straight into Covid hot clinics.
• Care Plans ensured those most vulnerable to coronavirus were treated at home where possible, and only sent to hospital if absolutely necessary.
• Increased strain on remote services was solved in seconds as our products store everything on the cloud. We simply boosted our capacity by 25 per cent with Amazon Web Services (AWS), assured by NHS Digital.

Away from the pandemic, all our products got onto the NHS Digital GP IT Futures Framework last year while it was exciting to see SIDeR Shared Care Record going live along with our ePaCCS in Humber Coast and Vale and our frailty and dementia care plan in Manchester. And we launched QuickFHIR – meaning everyone can now connect quickly, easily and affordably to HL7 FHIR® on AWS.

Looking forward, 2021 will be a big year for Core Care Plans as we create off-the-shelf systems for mental health services, diabetes, social prescribing services and chronic kidney disease. As part of our process of continual improvement we are undertaking a technology refresh of Core so it’s one step ahead of the next big challenge for our health service, as well as helping more providers and app suppliers share data with QuickFHIR. To tick this all off we are going to bolster the Black Pear team with a host of new recruits throughout the year including a new Chief Business Development Officer to continue the good work of our sadly departed Sean. So after the darkness of 2020, we are looking forward to a brighter 2021.