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Key Information Summary (KIS)

What we do

The National Information Systems Group (NISG) provides project management for the KIS project, to ensure that the development, testing, implementation and rollout are completed to time, quality and budget.  NISG is responsible for delivering all project documentation including Privacy Impact and Health Impact Assessments to support clinical and information governance processes.

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What KIS is

KIS is an extension to the existing Emergency Care Summary (ECS) system, and is designed to support patients with long term conditions or who have anticipatory care plans in place.  Information is shared with patient consent and KIS will be available for all ECS users in NHS24, Out of Hours (OOH) organisations, Accident and Emergency departments and the Scottish Ambulance Service.

KIS contains Special information from the GP practice and also:

  1. Patient demographics and details of staff involved in care
  2. Current situation, including main diagnosis and current issues
  3. Carer and support details
  4. Information and recommended action for OOH clinicians

Full details on KIS are available on the ECS website: http://www.ecs.scot.nhs.uk (N3 connection required).

KIS FAQs 03.07.12 v2.2 

The benefits

The development of the KIS by NISG is expected to have significant patient, clinical and technical benefits.

The benefits of KIS on patient care are summarised against the six Dimensions of Quality as follows:

Quality Outcome Description
Safer Improved patient safety is a critical benefit of KIS, particularly the reduction in errors due to transcription of data from paper based records. KIS will enable the sharing of clinical details between primary care and NHS24 for patients with long term conditions, mental health issues and special needs. KIS will improve communications between primary care and Out of Hours organisations and enable key information and patient wishes to be available.
More effective KIS will share information effectively through the clinical portal by providing a simple mechanism for practices to make past medical history, patient wishes and special alerts available to secondary care.
More efficient Information will be more efficiently shared by providing practices with a mechanism for updating key details on the GP record, and then automatically extracting it for sharing, plus links to an internal GP system reminder. KIS will use a standardised form that will allow all specialties and all areas to use the same method of displaying information, making information clear and minimising training need, therefore more efficiently using clinical time. Improved efficiency is also expected in OOH organisations with electronic submission of data as this will remove the need for manual input.
More equitable Any patient could benefit from the development of KIS as it is not restricted to specific clinical information (e.g. sharing of patient wishes).
More timely Automatic processing of information onto ECS will enable patient information to be more timely available to end user clinicians.
More patient centred KIS will enable patient wishes and other important information that a patient wants to share to be available. KIS also has a clear consent process for sharing agreed patient information.