History

The Scottish Health Plan – Our National Health: A plan for action, a plan for change identified Diabetes as a priority condition for NHS Scotland.

In 2001 an Option Appraisal report was commissioned by the Scottish Executive Health Department (SEHD) on the most effective method of providing central support for information technology to improve diabetes care in Scotland – ‘Option Appraisal for a Diabetes IT system for Scotland’ – Dr Bill Dodd, January 2001.

A number of different approaches were considered.  The SEHD accepted the recommendation that a national IT system to support diabetes care should be implemented, and that this should be based on collaborative development of the Lanarkshire Diabetes System (LDS), the Diabetes Audit and Research in Tayside Scotland (DARTS) System and the Scottish Care Information (SCI) Clinical IT Systems.

A Scottish Diabetes Framework was launched in 2001 and a Framework Working Group established to develop an inclusive strategy to shape the direction of diabetes care in Scotland.  The Scottish Diabetes Framework identified that well managed, integrated diabetes care must be underpinned by effective information technology systems.  A consultation paper was delivered in July 2001, and a Steering Group formed to steer a project to drive forward the IM&T milestones identified.   This project to be known as the Scottish Care Information – Diabetes Collaboration (SCI-DC) Project.

In 2004 the SCI-DC Strategic Planning Report recommended SCI-DC move towards a single fully integrated Web Based system (SCI-DC Phase II). As a result of NHS Scotland’s eHealth Strategy (2004) decision to procure a Generic Clinical System Toolkit (GCS), SCI-DC and the then Scottish Executive eHealth Department agreed to develop the SCI-DC integrated system using the GCS. This proved to be problematic and a decision to stop using GCS was taken by the Scottish Government eHealth Department (SGHD) in 2008 as a result of an independent report.

In 2006 SCI-DC implemented screens and an interface to support the Diabetic Retinopathy Screening Programme (DRSP). Diabetic Retinopathy is the biggest single cause of Blindness and Visual Impairment amongst working age people in Scotland and SCI-DC’s role in identifying and sending eligible patients to the Soarian system (DRSP software) for  regular eye screening is crucial to the success of this critical screening programme.

In December 2008 SCI-DC commissioned an independent review of their products with a view to consolidating into a single system (SCI-DC Phase III) for diabetic care acrossScotland, as well as moving to the latest relevant technologies. The Scottish Diabetes Group (SDG) agreed to provide additional support to the existing Scottish Government funding for this development in 2009.

In January 2014 the SCI-DC Team successfully completed the migration of Health Boards to the single SCI-DC system – SCI-Diabetes.