Improvements made to shared care record for Covid patients

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Improvements have been made to the Covid Clinical Care Module (CCCM) to make it more user friendly for GPs, who are struggling to deal with the large number of Covid-19 cases in the community.

The CCCM is a national shared care record for Covid patients. It is an iteration of the Border Clinical Management System, which was developed for use in Managed Isolation and Quarantine Facilities and is a modified version of the indici practice management system.

All Covid-19 care coordination hubs, general practices and some other healthcare providers, such as Urgent Care Centres and Emergency Departments, are able to access the CCCM.

When eHealthNews spoke to GP leaders in February, they said the system was creating more work and stress when GPs were already exceptionally busy and they wanted it to be an ‘option’ for them to use.

Ministry of Health COVID Care in the Community lead Joe Bourne says a number of improvements have been made based on health sector feedback and vaccination and medicine records are now automatically pulled through from the patient management system.

Another recently launched feature is that GPs can create a record in CCCM themselves if they see a patient with a positive result, rather than have to retrospectively add information once the record has been created by the system.

Bourne says the time taken for a new positive test result to generate a CCCM record had been the biggest barrier to GPs using the system.

“Change takes time, but we are lot further along than we were even a few weeks ago,” he tells eHealthNews.

“The digital team is working incredibly hard, but when you are redoing a system to work in a different context it’s going to take time to meet the particular needs of that context.”

Bourne acknowledges that it is difficult to adopt a new technology when general practices are already very busy and says while use of CCCM is not compulsory, where possible GPs should prioritise patients under ‘active management’, who may need out of hours care from another provider.

For the vast majority of people who are self-managing at home, GPs are being ask to briefly use the system to log that the person has been assessed as low risk

“We’re trying to be as pragmatic as possible, but it’s important that everyone interacts with the system - even in a nominal way - so the hub can see that the GP is aware of the case and that they’ve had an initial assessment,” explains Bourne.

“Use isn’t consistent across the country, but a number of areas are using it really well and we are continuing to encourage it because this provides better connectivity to the care coordination hubs, after hours and even emergency departments”.

In the future he would like to see the good aspects of CCCM retained and developed to create a national shared care record that is integrated with the GP patient management systems.

“More information helps to make better decisions and that’s why I’m keen to continue to iterate to make it more user friendly for GPs and other practice staff, because if we can get it right, it’s a significant legacy to leave to the health system beyond Covid,” Bourne says.



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