|
View from the Top - Part 2 | Part 1
Read Part 1
|
CORPORATE FILE
|
 |
|
The Government’s recently launched NHS National Strategic Programme aims to create a ‘single patient view’, using integration technology. Salford Royal Hospitals NHS Trust has taken its own steps in this direction.
Salford is a medium-sized teaching hospital with over 900 beds, serving around 300,000 local people and providing specialist rheumatology, neurosciences, dermatology, intestinal failure and nephrology services to patients from across the UK.
In 1999, the Trust piloted a project to implement an electronic patient record (EPR) system, using SeeBeyond’s e*Gate Integrator as the integration platform.
The EPR system provides the hospital wards and consultants with a list of patients and their results in real time. There are 800 PCs in the hospital. Consultants put a diagnosis into the EPR, then any pathology and/or radiology results are added as they happen. Everything a carer needs to know about a patient is visible on one screen.
Since it went live in July 2000, the new system has distributed over 7 million PAS messages, 3.2 million pathology results, 360,000 radiology results and 880,000 clinical letters.
|
Q: HOW DID YOU BUILD UP THE SYSTEM?
A: After interfacing the patient administration system, the first thing we included were the pathology and radiology results. One is an SQL database running on Unix and the other is a Mumps system running on Unix. Both were incapable of real-time interfacing so we chose a batch approach, updating with results every two minutes.
The SeeBeyond database picks the file up and processes it via the FTP protocol. One file can contain anything from one up to 100 results. The system does a few checks, such as the patient’s unique number, their date of birth, that the name of the patient is spelt correctly, then if it is correct, it’s processed into HL7 and into the EPR system.
We didn’t want rubbish going in. We check for excluded results and process them manually, and generally if there is a problem it’s because we can’t match the result to the patient, the number is obscure or the date of birth is wrong, or both.
We have added more systems since. We put in A&E (accident and emergency) and a secretarial system that generates around 1,500 letters a night including outpatients’ attendance, discharge letters and operation notes. We built the system up, developing these interfaces, over the next 12-18 months.
Inpatients records, and the pathology and radiology results were added in August 2000. The outpatients was added by about March 2001.
More...
If you are not registered with the site, please register now to read the rest of this page.
If you are registered, please sign in to read the rest of this page.
Conspectus 2003
|
Copyright © 2003
|
 |
|
