Royal Liverpool signs CSC portal deal

The Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust has confirmed that it has become the first trust to sign a deal for CSC’s clinical information portal.

The CSC clinical portal is an interoperability product that provides a single view of data from different systems. It forms part of the company’s new portfolio of NHS products launched earlier this year.

Following the signing of the contract last week, the trust told E-Health Insider that it is now defining the project scope and plans to begin rolling the system out in March in two separate phases.

The first phase will involve moving onto an enterprise platform and building the user interface and design elements of the system from scratch to suit the clinician’s needs as well as supporting two-way integration.

The later stage will then involve full roll-out of the system across the trust, while bringing systems in ‘rapid succession’ to complete the full implementation by spring 2012.

The portal technology is based on the Fusionfx platform from Carefx. CSC partnered with Carefx earlier this year to provide an interoperability platform to deliver its new range of products.

The deal follows a proof of concept (PoC) agreement that the trust had with NHS Connecting for Health to trial the system, which was developed as part of the interoperability toolkit.

The trust was also about to go out to tender for a portal, so used the PoC to support its business case during the tendering process.

James Norman, IT director at the trust, told EHI: “The trial was only meant to last two months but we extended it because the clinicians using the portal had gone paperless in their clinics and didn’t want to go back.

“Clinic times had been reduced by around 45 minutes and clinicians were able to view information prior to the clinic and refer to it throughout rather than turning away from a patient and having to log into another system.”

According to Norman, the system exceeded all of the targets which were put in place to determine whether a portal would be the way forward for the trust.

“Most of the targets were around the performance of the system-availability, speed, response, whether it brought in the right patient.

“The availability was far higher than we had set even on reduced capability servers. Other benefits we saw included the improved flow of patients through the clinics.”

The trust says that all those within the tendering process were put on level footing and that the PoC only determined whether there was a need for a portal – not whether CSC’s portal should be chosen.

However, Norman added: “The portal is to consolidate best of breed existing systems and allow one main view of all the disparate systems that we have by using context management to pull in information.”

He concluded: “This portal came out far superior compared to the other systems. It was like comparing 21st century technology to 20th century technology.”

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