Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust Implements Multi-Site Patient Administration System (PAS) in Just Four Months |
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InterSystems Corp.
One Memorial Dr.
Cambridge, MA, 02142
USA
Press release date: March 19, 2007
By using InterSystems Caché database, the Trust has improved its ability to manage its business more effectively and meet its NHS targets
Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust serves a patient population of 420,000 people and employs over 5,000 staff in its three hospitals and community settings. The Trust has implemented a single PAS solution across all areas, with the system successfully live in just 16 weeks.
The Trust had previously been operating with different PAS systems at its various sites (the Calderdale Royal Hospital in Halifax, the Huddersfield Royal Infirmary and St Luke's Hospital in Huddersfield). Working with different PAS systems resulted in duplicate patient records, repeated data entry and a burden for staff that needed to work at more than one site. Additionally, with its newly-won Foundation Hospital status, Calderdale and Huddersfield needed to ensure that new Government reporting commitments could be met regularly and on-time. The Trust management team saw that the continued use of disparate systems would make it difficult to meet these reporting commitments. As a consequence, the Trust worked with the SHA, Connecting for Health and its LSP to determine that the implementation of a single unified PAS could deliver significant benefits to the organisation, until CfH products are available to support it.
The Calderdale Royal Hospital site was already running a successful PAS solution based on database technology from InterSystems. The Trust was satisfied that this solution had the capability to extend into a multi-site deployment and the decision was therefore taken to standardise on a solution running on InterSystems' Caché database.
Users in Calderdale and Huddersfield now have a standard solution for patient management across the three major sites. This will help in reducing the duplication of patient records and improve the validation and management of critical patient information. The single PAS also presents an opportunity to simplify the inventory of interfaces to other hospital systems, and finally realise the goal of having a single reporting source for statutory reporting.
Originally the PAS running at the Halifax site was implemented on a UNIX server system. As part of the multi-site implementation, the use of Caché has enabled the application to be quickly migrated to a high-availability MS Windows server environment. The Trust can now run its total PAS workload on an inexpensive modern server platform, cutting the total cost of ownership and reducing the ongoing support burden for the Trust's IT staff.
John Rayner, Head of THIS (The Health Informatics Service) commented, "As well as the current benefits we are getting from Caché, this environment also provides potential future benefits. For example, we have the option to use the enhanced interoperability within Caché to make the PAS 'Choose and book' compliant. This could ultimately help us in our overall quest to improve care and service for our patients."
Graham Frost, Managing Director for Northern Europe at InterSystems, commented, "There are many existing systems with rich functionality that are delivering value to NHS end-users. We are delighted that this project shows how such solutions can continue to play a positive role going forward. The standardisation onto Caché revitalises the Trust's PAS environment by providing a number of benefits. These include much greater performance and scalability, access to modern hardware platforms, and connectivity to other applications in the hospital."
Diane Whittingham, CEO of Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust, concluded, "This successful implementation of InterSystems Caché is an example of our commitment to the community we serve. Any undertaking we make has to have as its ultimate aim to benefit our patients. Being able to manage our business more effectively, with greater compliance to NHS standards and increased productivity, is a real boost to the entire Trust."
For 29 years, InterSystems Corporation has provided innovative products that make applications more valuable. InterSystems Cache® is a high performance object database that makes applications faster and more scalable. InterSystems Ensemble® is rapid integration software that enriches applications with new functionality, and makes them connectable. InterSystems HealthShare(TM) is a platform that leverages existing healthcare applications to rapidly create a regional or national health information exchange. With world headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, InterSystems has offices in 21 countries and provides support to customers in 88 countries.
InterSystems is the premier provider of healthcare application platforms, with its products used by most of the world's major hospitals and labs, including America's 10 best hospitals as rated by U.S. News and World Report. For more information, visit InterSystems.com.
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