Aintree sticks with System C

Aintree University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with a new upgraded clinical information system from System C.

The trust, which has used System C software for over a decade, has become the latest to upgrade to the company’s Medway Sigma Clinician’s Desktop, which is now in use across the organisation.

Over 1,000 staff at the trust, including 700 clinicians, made the switch to the new system last week. By early 2010, up to 3,000 staff are expected to be using it.

System C says that Clinician’s Desktop offers a wide range of clinical functionality including results reporting, radiology and pathology order requesting, clinical alerts, integrated viewing of PACS images, work lists, discharge summaries and clinical correspondence.

Professor Mike Pearson, the lead clinician involved, said: “This system brings together test ordering, results and other clinical information in ways that should make care not only faster, but also safer.”

Ward Priestman, Aintree’s director of informatics, said: “This has been a very smooth deployment and it is a pleasure working on a project focused on supporting clinicians.

"The next phases of the programme – integrated prescribing, integrated electronic document management, and patient kiosks for outpatient clinic registration – are due to be completed by April 2010.”

Before making the switch to Medway Sigma, the Aintree system was pre-populated with 10 years of patient activity, 3m clinical letters and over 600,000 test results.

The data collected is fed real-time into Medway Sigma Business Intelligence (BI) system, a data warehouse and reporting system installed in May.

This helps to ensure that data is available for all standard outputs, including reports, ad hoc queries, and data displays, together with a recently installed bed management dashboard.

Dr Ian Denley, chief executive of System C, said the company had completed over a dozen successful Medway Sigma deployments this year, including patient management, clinical, maternity, and business intelligence systems.

He said that Clinician’s Desktop was part of the new Sigma product, itself “an evolution of Medway on the Microsoft platform."

One of the main features of the Medway Sigma suite is said to be its ability to operate as part of the Medway Sigma PAS/EPR solution or as an add-on to a third party PAS.

“We’ve invested a lot over the past three years in upgrading the technology in Sigma,” Dr Denley said.

According to System C Medway Sigma is designed to work with the full suite of Microsoft development tools and its document and sharing platforms, such as Office, SharePoint, and SQL Server.

The Sigma suite is one of the first software products in the NHS to incorporate significant elements of the Microsoft developed Common User Interface (CUI), giving standard presentation of key data such dates and drug dosages.