Managed Clinical Network (MCN) Clinical Audit System
With the support of funding from the Scottish Government National Delivery Plan for Specialist Children's Services, National Services Division and National Information Systems Group have worked to develop a Clinical Audit System for Managed Clinical Networks. This system is now available for all Managed Clinical Networks.
All Managed Clinical Networks need information to support the delivery of effective care:
- Clinicians seeing patients remotely from their main base (in outreach and shared care clinics) need access to basic patient details
- multidisciplinary teams working across Scotland need to share information to take decisions on case management
- aggregate information is needed by MCNs to assess performance against accredited quality standards and to drive up the quality of care
- aggregate information is needed to assess the impact of clinical protocols on the health of children cared for by clinicians within the network.
Whilst the services covered by Managed Clinical Networks are varied, the underlying requirements for information are almost identical for all. NSD commissioned National Information Systems Group (NISG) to develop a web-based audit data capture system to securely link hospital sites involved in the delivery of care within MCNs. This system allows clinicians to register patients and enter basic clinical information to assist them in providing patient care from various sites.
Managed Clinical Networks need to have the ability to retrieve data when required for clinical, research and audit purposes. The coverage of National Managed Clinical Networks is by their very nature national, and as such there is a need for clinicians to share basic clinical information across NHS Board boundaries to support the delivery of care.
The Managed Clinical Network (MCN) Clinical Audit System has been developed by National Information Systems Group in order to support networks in improving and monitoring the quality of patient care.
The MCN Clinical Audit System:
- Provides a data entry facility for network clinicians to enter in relevant and valuable clinical information to support clinical audit
- Provides a basic patient register for each MCN, so that each network is aware of the total number of patients that they are managing and relevant demographic information
- Supports multi‐disciplinary teams by allowing clinical staff in the same MCN, but distributed geographically across Scotland and from different clinical specialties, to access the same clinical information about the patients they are treating
- Produces user‐defined reports to support network clinical audit to track changes in the quality of care and patient outcomes (e.g. against agreed clinical quality standards and by recording adherence to MCN protocols).
Three networks are currently implementing the system. These are the IMD Scotland (Inherited Metabolic Disease Scotland Network), the Scottish Genital Anomaly Network and the Scottish Paediatric and Adult Rheumatology Network.
A link with SCI store for demographics is being developed, and will soon be released, which will reduce the need for clinicians to have to manually populate demographic information in the system.
A website is currently being developed which will provide further information on the system.
National Services Division contacts:
To contact members of NSD staff, please visit our staff contacts page. For more information on the Clinical Audit System, please contact:
Chris Myers, Programme Manager
