St Helens completes Paris roll-out

St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has completed the roll out of the Paris child health and community services system across two primary care trusts in the North West.

The trust, which signed a deal with Logica for the Paris system from Civica Healthcare last January, began going live across NHS Halton and St Helens and NHS Knowsley on schedule at the end of November last year.

The system, which has replaced the previous paper and ageing Comwise systems, is now allowing around 500 staff including midwives, home visiting teams, health visitors and school nurses to manage medical issues, meet immunisation requirements and view health alerts more effectively.

Paul Goss, senior consultant for eHealth at Logica, told eHealth Insider that the new system provides patient information including formal documentation and requests for immunisations to contraceptive advice, from newborns to the end of school age.

Goss explained the system uses a single, partitioned database that includes a central data entry – so that although the two trusts have a single server with two databases, many of the applications can be viewed by both organisations. 

For example, each trust is able is to see an alert for a child that visits both PCTs.

The consent model is based on legitimate access and role based access and uses a security matrix that depends on department/team/profession and if necessary the individual accessing the information.

Goss added: “Benefits achieved already show that they system has enabled the providers to operate a much slicker process and been able to rebalance between workers in community school workers and central administration.

“Usually child health is done by central administration but now more information is in the hands of school visitors.

"There is also a lot more automated scheduling which can enable the planning of clinics up to a year in advance by pulling relevant patient lists from the central authority.

The trusts are now extending the project to focus more on mobile access through the use of laptops in order to further eradicate paper in their working practice.

In addition, the organisations will begin rolling out the community health system to district nurses followed by community matrons over the next few months.