Milton Keynes extends Amalga roll-out

Milton Keynes NHS Foundation Trust will roll out Microsoft’s Amalga Unified Intelligence System across the entire trust over the next two months.

The trust, which became the first in the UK to sign a deal with Microsoft for the system last January, has implemented the system in order to provide a single real time view of its business and clinical systems.

Amalga pulls raw patient information from a variety of existing core systems, such as the trust’s Cerner Millennium patient administration system, to provide users with a consolidated view of patient information.

Since signing the deal 12-months ago, the trust has been working on the build process to allow data feeds to be integrated from systems including Millennium, discharges and transfers, clinical letters, pathology data and maternity information.

However, when clinicians and managers provided positive feedback after trialling the system, the trust decided to both roll it out further and provide a series of new tools.

David Powell, head of information management and technology, told eHealth Insider: “We held a series of workshops in November, where we developed 50-60 use cases. We knew we couldn’t do all of them so we prioritised 20-24.

“The core Amalga product provides access to such things as pathology and radiology results.

"But over the last three or four months we’ve been using it to look at much more specialised areas – such as length of stay for example – to improve quality of care benefit and improve cost reduction.”

The system will be rolled out to more than 700 people, including clinical, admin and finance staff . The trust is trying to target the use cases so that there is “a mixture of clinical and admin orientated ones”.

Powell said Amalga has also improved the trust’s reporting. He said that while reports used to take months to generate, they can now be tailored exactly to the trust’s specific needs and adjusted when needs reporting preferences change.

For example, he said: “We’ve now started using Amalga for the CQUIN payment framework. We’re developing CQUIN forms within Amalga so it’s generating income for the trust because we can demonstrate that we are hitting our targets.”

Other areas that the trust is looking at include developing a complete discharge pathway tool within Amalga as well as handover documentation.

Amalga has provided the trust with a portal approach to accessing information, supported by the implementation of single sign-on.

However, it says it is committed to Cerner Millennium, which it received under the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

Powell told EHI: “Cerner still remains our single source of truth for demographic information.

"Amalga doesn’t replace the underlying systems, but it is agnostic. If we get to a point where we do replace CRS or any other system then we would just take the feeds from it.”

Powell added that it has had a significant amount of interest from other trusts looking to implement Amalga, many of who are looking to use Amalga to integrate community services.