Endocrine Abstracts

In Scotland, a standardised electronic health record (Scottish Care Information-Diabetes (SCI-diabetes)) has been in use for patient care in diabetes since the late 1990s, gaining nationwide coverage by mid-2000s. The record uses a unique healthcare identifier, the Community Health Index (CHI) number, which is also used on all other administrative health datasets in Scotland. SCI-Diabetes dashboards provide summary information enabling clinical teams to evaluate achievement in processes of care. These have been important for improving quality of care that is reported annually through a national audit. In addition to these aspects, we established a National Diabetes Research Data Platform to enable linkage of useful datasets with the data in the SCI-Diabetes record in a secure environment. This yields a pseudoanonymised database, updated annually with those newly diagnosed, and rich in a wide range of data. This has many uses, for example, understanding healthcare burden and socioeconomic trends in disease incidence and prevalence, observational pharmacoepidemiology studies and building prediction tools to support clinical decision making. In this talk Professor Colhoun will outline the architecture of the system, some of the critical challenges in establishing such a system and will give examples of its use for informing policy and practice.