McKesson for Coventry and Warwickshire

NHS Coventry and NHS Warwickshire have gone live with McKesson’s child health management system, CarePlus Child Health.

The go-live included the migration of 390,000 registration records onto one database and the replacement of three disparate systems that were previously in place across the region.

The system is now in use by four child health administration teams across Coventry and Warwickshire allowing clinicans to access information to assist in patient care across key sites.

Robin Turton, senior project manager at NHS Warwickshire, said: “In order to support child protection and child health initiatives, we had acknowledged a need to work more closely across the two organisations.

"When it came to replacing our legacy systems, we decided to stay with McKesson because they have always delivered an excellent service.”

As part of the migration to the single database, the organisations’ national coding sets have been transferred in order to bring their coding in line with current NHS standards.

Turton added: “We wanted to maintain the functionality of our previous systems, whilst taking advantage of the opportunity to standardise our processes and work a lot more quickly and efficiently across the region.

“The single electronic view has enabled is to access information a lot more quickly, improving communication between the administrative and clinical teams and supporting the grounds for service redesign.”

The web based system provides a tool-kit of facilities to control the child health programme both in single or multiple trusts or strategic health authorities.

The system can be implemented in modules, with core modules including: registration, which controls the entry of children into the system; and immunisation, which ensures that children are invited for their correct immunisations at the right time.

NHS Coventry and NHS Warwickshire have also implemented additional functionality that allows them to track children through nursery and school health.

McKesson has also committed to working with third party suppliers to enable interoperability with other systems in order to allow the trusts to create a full electronic health record.

Adrian Wookey, vice president of service delivery for McKesson UK, said: “Having Coventry and Warwickshire primary care trusts choose to remain with McKesson and migrate from one of our legacy systems to our strategic child health solution, is testament that demand continues for our reliable and proven services."