Universal Care Plan: Making personalised care a reality

The Universal Care Plan is a dynamic integrated care planning solution that enables every Londoner to have their care, health status, and support wishes digitally shared with healthcare professionals across the capital.

• The UCP programme currently supports pathways for urgent and end of life care but has plans in place to extend to other areas of care. This includes, but is not limited to, supporting people with sickle cell disease, dementia, frailty, children and young people, asthma, mental health needs, learning disabilities, autism, and others.
• The solution shares real-time data across primary, secondary, and community health care settings and geographies across the region, whilst enabling the relevant technical capability to provide interoperability with the existing health and care IT systems.

What is the Universal Care Plan for London?

The Universal Care Plan is a conversation between a healthcare professional and the citizen in their care, where the professional will listen, understand, and make notes on their care and support wishes such as what is essential in day-to-day life, care preferences, information about personal contacts involved, and urgent care key information such as diagnosis, prognosis, symptom management.

It is a platform that serves the entire London region and ensures that care is tailored to personal needs and delivered as close to home as possible. It supports a collaborative and data-first approach to improving technology, information governance, and how health and care services are provided and experienced across London.

The Universal Care Plan brings together multiple electronic patient records, personal health records, or electronic palliative care coordination systems in standardised data fields and is accessible to all urgent care services. It is based on the openEHR standard that enables information and data sharing.

Key functionalities of the Universal Care Plan

Improved accessibility
Users accessing the UCP via interoperable electronic patient records do not need separate log-in credentials. The solution is accessible as a standalone and in context launch in the GP system (EMIS, EMIS Community, TPP, SystmOne), emergency care Adastra, Cleric, acute system Cerner.

Reduced duplication
Care plans can be pre-populated with relevant information from the patient’s GP record. Specified SNOMED codes can be written back to GP records.

Template development
The technology underpinning the Universal Care Plan enables multiple care plan templates to be created. Hence, it will be possible to support a greater variety of clinical pathways.