Clinical Safety Risk - Vision Data Processing Failures Related to Internal Handling of Phone Number Data

Cegedim Healthcare Solutions has been made aware of an issue that may result in data entered in Vision 3 from synchronising in Vision 360 and then render the record as inaccessible in Vision 360. This occurs if a patient record contains phone number data exceeding the permitted limit of 100 characters. This causes an error to be thrown resulting in the patient data not being available for display by any products and services that consume it for viewing by users. This presents a clinical safety risk as a clinician not having access to this information at the point of direct care may have implications for patient treatment. 

Products and services that consume data affected by this issue include the following: 

• Individual Health Record (IHR) available for viewing by emergency and out-of-hours services across NHS Wales
• Vision 360 Practice / Shared Access
• Vision 360 Appointments
• Vision Community in use across NHS Grampian
• Data Extracts  
• Any other applications that use Vision 360 (e.g. Clinical Portal) 

Where a patient record affected by this issue is unable to be accessed, an advisory message appropriate to the application concerned will be displayed to a user (e.g. an “access denied” message within Vision 360 Practice / Shared Access). 

Users of Vision 360 Appointments can successfully book appointments for patients whose records are affected by this issue but are not able to access their contact details. 

Note that the patient records concerned are able to be successfully viewed using Vision Anywhere as Vision Anywhere does not consume data affected by this issue but rather obtains patient record data directly from Vision 3. 

A fix has been developed and will be deployed in the coming days that will fully resolve this issue once implemented. In addition to preventing any further instances of this issue, the deployment of this fix will also result in any previously unsynchronised data being reprocessed successfully. Consequently, there will be no missing data following the implementation of the fix. Notwithstanding, there is a possibility that affected data may have been inappropriately excluded from data extracts run from when this issue has existed (since late November 2023). Therefore, as additional mitigation against the clinical safety risk, Cegedim Healthcare Solutions recommends that any such data extracts that are used to inform decision making by clinicians at the point of patient care delivery are re-run following deployment of the fix. This will ensure that affected data is appropriately included in any re-run extracts, post-fix.