When Derby met Harris

Derby Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has built a bespoke portal with Harris Healthcare that it hopes will make the hospital paper-lite.

Speaking at the Best Practice Showcase at EHI Live 2012, Donna Rogers, senior clinical facilitator at Derby Hospitals said it had decided on the open standards portal because interoperability is key.

“We wanted to minimise the impact of changing the systems and we needed a portal that would make the transitions seamless,” she said.

Rogers told the event that many of the trust’s major systems contracts are coming to an end. It is running a procurement process for a new patient administration system and needs a portal to integrate the new PAS with other systems, as contracts for them are agreed.

She told eHealth Insider the trust had looked carefully at the market before choosing the Harris portal.

“We went out to a number of organisations and we said ‘show us’. We gave everyone the same amount of time and Harris came back with a great solution.”

The trust started by integrating systems and giving the project team and clinicians in the outpatient department access to the new portal.

Phase two testing is now underway, and the trust hopes to go fully live with the portal by the end of the year.

Rogers said it was important to have clinicians on board from day one, helping the portal evolve.

“We have the project team and clinicians using the portal, and we are figuring out really what we want and making sure it works.

“When they don’t like something, they let us know. The users are the people who actually built the system.”

The portal will hold demographics, alerts, outpatient prescribed medications, orders and results, and clinical correspondence and specialty based information.

Rogers highlights that the point of going paper-lite is to reduce costs and make the job easier. “We don’t want to have to duplicate anything. We want the portal to piece relevant pieces of info together.”

She added she was very excited about the aesthetics: “It might seem silly, but the fact that the portal looks pretty helps. We’re putting ‘elegant’ back into clinical systems.”