Digital Child Health

The DCH programme has four main objectives:

Efficiency savings for CHIS: use new infrastructure and messaging to replace paper notifications and re-keying of information in regional CHIS offices releasing resources for failsafing children and other services. 

Improvements for services delivering the Healthy Child programme: use new infrastructure and messaging to improve the efficiency of information exchange between health visiting, primary care and school nursing, leading to more timely and comprehensive information on a child’s health available to professionals, potentially leading to better decision support and improved outcomes for children.

A foundation for digital personal child health records: use new infrastructure and messaging to provide interoperability for digital personal child health records (DPCHR) to supplement or replace paper redbooks, making it easier for families to hold online records for their children and access them via smartphones, laptops and tablets.

A national failsafe management service offering:

1. Population cohort management for direct care services and public health in conjunction with PDS. Identifying where children are not under the care of a responsible agency delivering the Healthy Child programme, that is a GP practice, health visiting service or CHIS.
2. Pathway management of the Healthy Child programme, ensuring all children and young people in a local population are invited to receive preventative services and monitoring if the offer has been taken up, when the treatment or review took place and what the outcome was.

The Digital Child Health programme is a collaboration between, NHS Digital, NHS England, NHSx, PHE and regional exemplar sites and health system suppliers to improve interoperability of child health information in support of the Healthy Child programme, the preventative care pathway offered to all children in England.

Exemplar regions for child health interoperability are:

• North East London
• South Central West

Our supplier partners working in these areas are:

• System C
• Servelec
• Sitekit
• Northgate
• TPP

The Digital Child Health programme has 4 main areas of responsibility:

We have published the Healthy Child Record standard in collaboration with the Professional Records Standards Body (PRSB). It explains how information systems supporting the Healthy Child programme should structure their data and is part of the make their systems compliant with the new standard. We need information standards to ensure different systems can ‘talk’ to each other, that is, it ensures they speak the same language and present the same type of data in the same way to achieve a common understanding. This work is be part of the DAPB3009 Healthy Child programme which instructs IT suppliers to make their systems compliant with the new standard.

The National Event Management Service (NEMS) allows health services and organisations to publish and subscribe Healthy Child programme information, and connects parents to that information via digital personal health child records. The programme also works with local infrastructure to see how these can be connected centrally.

We are also working to set up the National Failsafe Management service which send messages to services, organisations and parents prompting them to ensure children are registered with service providers and are not missing out on the preventative programme of care.

The new NHS citizen facing apps have been developed to help parents  access information for their children. The new digital personal child health record (DPCHR) is being trialled in London and is part of the private beta partnership. It connects to NEMS to receive child health information from the NHS. It also uses the new NHS identity service NHS login to securely identify parents wishing to receive NHS information digitally for their children so they can begin a personal child health record for them.

We are using the new standards and infrastructure to support the rapid exchange of child information between health services, organisations and parents. We hope a more timely and complete information exchange will lead to improved outcomes for children’s health. Those settings currently included in the programme are health visiting, primary care, child health information services (CHIS) and digital personal health records for children (DPCHR).