Cardiff to be Oracle Healthcare Customer Advisor

Cardiff and Vale NHS Trust will be a key Customer Advisor in Oracle Corporation’s development of a web-based, patient-centred healthcare information system based on its leading e-business suite.

The Oracle Healthcare integrated solution is intended to help provide improved efficiency, cost-effectiveness and quality of care to hospitals and other care delivery organisations by consolidating clinical, administrative and financial data and business rules

Oracle also announced at the annual US Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMMS) Conference that it will establish a customer advisory board to provide "hands-on" guidance in the development and implementation of the new Oracle Healthcare solution.

Among the founder members of the board, drawn from leading healthcare delivery organisations in North America and Europe, will be Cardiff and Vale NHS Trust.

Board members will contribute to the development and testing of Oracle Healthcare, providing input and feedback on solution requirements and site testing the platform and its applications.

"The clinical team is very much in support of and excited by the opportunities the Oracle partnership provides," said David Edwards, Chief Executive, Cardiff and Vale NHS Trust.

"This will involve allowing the use of modern technology to help facilitate and enable improvements to clinical processes and therefore improved care to our patients rather than having change frustrated by the inadequacies of current generation systems," added Edwards.

Oracle Healthcare will provide organisations with applications developed on an open service architecture and technical platform, the Oracle Healthcare Transaction Base.

The Oracle Healthcare Transaction Base is based on health industry standards, such as HL7 version 3, and will provide a single, comprehensive source of patient information and support the seamless integration of Oracle Healthcare applications, third-party applications and other components of the Oracle E-Business Suite Information Architecture.

A key objective of the Healthcare Transaction Base will be to enable organisations to manage business transactions consistently in the patient care process; and maximise clinical data reuse and portability through the use of standards, allowing for seamless integration and consistent implementation between different healthcare information systems.

"To ensure that Oracle Healthcare Transaction Base is the most robust and comprehensive platform in the industry, we are working with a number of leading healthcare providers and software vendors to take advantage of their industry-specific expertise," said John Wookey, Oracle senior vice president, applications development.