Nuffield Hospitals sign for Initiate EMPI
- 23 February 2007
Initiate Systems has been awarded a contract to build an Enterprise Master Patient Index which will enable staff at Nuffield Hospitals around the country to integrate data from their existing systems and create a single record for each patient.
As revealed by E-Health Insider in January, Nuffield Hospitals will have Agfa Healthcare’s IMPAX 6.2 Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) installed along with a new Radiology Information System, Computed Radiography systems and the Initiate Master Patient Index in all 40 of Nuffield Group’s hospitals.
Initiate have confirmed that they will be installing their Identity Hub software to access data in the trusts’ Patient Administration Systems, and the PACS/RIS solutions.
Initiate Identity Hub software is a software solution designed for customer data integration (CDI), enterprise master person index (EMPI) and entity resolution. It gives users a complete, real-time view for each customer, patient, household or organisation, on demand.
Nuffield’s IT director, Chris Cook, said: “Nuffield Hospitals is committed to the principles of patient safety, continual improvement and pro-actively implementing technology to ensure the most positive patient experience and outcomes.
“With the increasing demands both from within the NHS, to meet the government’s patient choice initiative, and within private healthcare to continually improve services, we see the creation of an integrated, single view of all patient contact to be fundamental to our future strategic development.”
The EMPI will provide accurate patient identification across private and public boundaries enabling the authorised data exchange of patient history for more timely patient care.
It will show an accurate real-time, single view of the patient on all systems allowing for improved diagnosis and eliminating the need for duplicate tests, improving cost effectiveness and patient satisfaction.
Initiate is a member of the Integrating the Health Enterprise (IHE) initiative in the US and recently became the first vendor to have achieved Health Level 7 Version 3 (HL7 V3) for Patient Identifier Cross-reference (PIX) Manager and Patient Demographic Query (PDQ) Manager interoperability standards.
Cook added: “Initiate’s adherence to IHE standards was of particular interest to us as it enables us to facilitate the interoperability necessary for interaction within the NHS and between our disparate in-house systems, and it also provides a firm foundation for future developments.”
The EMPI will incorporate existing patient information, information from Nuffield Proactive Health, its employee programme and Vanguard Healthcare, its mobile healthcare division.
It is hoped that with the single EMPI, Nuffield will overcome the issues of individual patient, contract or treatment numbering systems in each hospital – instead using just one file for each patient across all of the systems.
Initiate’s vice president, Tony Bowden, said: “With this new implementation, the Initiate EMPI will, in total, be used to process health records for almost 20% of the UK’s population.”
Work is expected to take one year, with full transition expected to be completed by early 2008.
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