More than 40 million patients now have a Summary Care Record pulled from GP systems, NHS England has revealed.
The SCR is an electronic record containing information about patients including allergies, medication and adverse reactions.
The data can be viewed by health professionals involved in patient care.
The new GP contract also requires GPs to give patients online access to the held in the SCR by the end of March 2015.
GP practices will be required to provide an automated upload of their summary information to the SCR, or have published plans in place to achieve this by the same date.
NHS England is currently focusing on rolling out use of the SCR in A&E, NHS 111 and GP out-of-hours services.
SCR usage is high, with clinicians viewing them more than 19,000 times a week.
Beverley Bryant, director of strategic systems and technology, NHS England, said: “NHS England are delighted that this significant milestone has been achieved. The value of Summary Care Record is being seen in a number of care settings with viewing volumes now growing quickly on the back of the great progress in making records available. This in turn is driving the main objectives which are improvement in patient care and efficiencies in the NHS.
“Clinicians across all care settings are keen to use the SCR because they can see it is working for them giving them succinct, easy to access information about their patients. It speeds up their work, makes the process much easier and prevents the patient having to repeat the same information several times.”
The SCR is one of the key projects of the National Programme for IT in the NHS.
In July 2013, it was expanded to include patients’ end-of-life care information, immunisations, and significant past problems and procedures.
