Why is this important?
How can technology support and enable efficient, cost-effective and high quality, person-centred care? The answer lies in electronic clinical management systems, which systematically collect data at the point of contact with patients.
For patients, this means not having to repeat their relevant details and medical history. And this, in turn, enables greater continuity of care from a safe and more responsive service, and the use of virtual clinics and monitoring.
For clinicians, it means accessing shared, current information at the point of care to inform treatment decisions.
The benefits of having robust IT systems and transferring data to the UK IBD Registry are clear. First, it demonstrates patient outcomes and the quality of services to commissioners and commissioning bodies. Second, it provides a central, anonymised dataset of IBD patients that will drive improvements and inform local and national planning and research.
We know that better local data, collected electronically, helps teams to manage their IBD service more effectively. By collecting data at the point of patient contact, we can run continuous and high-quality prospective audits of all aspects of clinical care – and benchmark against UK, local and regional data.