Royal Wolverhampton Goes for Optimum EPR

The Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals (RWH) NHS Trust has contracted with Optimum HealthWare, a division of VisionWare Plc, to incrementally develop an EPR system pulling together information from different hospital department systems.

Information from existing trust legacy systems will be drawn together using Optimum HealthWare’s web-based EPR application VuePoint, and an e-Biz 2000 XML integration engine.

The first components to be deployed will be Test Requesting and Results Reporting to develop an electronic ward ordering system. Further modules are expected to be deployed adding to the overall development of the Trust’s EPR.

Charles Millar, head of IM&T at RWH said “We need to develop a mechanism for requesting pathology tests and other services electronically directly from wards and outpatient areas. Linking this with our Patient Management System to incorporate patient demographics and with departmental systems should result in more reliable and accurate patient clinical data."

The web-based VuePoint Test Requesting module will allow clinical users to request patient tests for Pathology disciplines online, while its Results Reporting module will present clinical results to users through a web browser and be presented as either discreet values, textual values or alternatively as images.

RWH is using VuePoint’s centralised information repository to store clinical data that has been extracted from source systems and assembled into a patient record. E-Biz 2000 will be used to develop the messaging framework that will initially enable electronic communication of diagnostic information with GPs.

Gordon Cooper, managing director of VisionWare said: “Future plans are now to work with RWH on a range of developments including ways of achieving reliable identification of patients across all the systems in the Trust".