James Paget takes on Viper

James Paget University Hospitals NHS Trust will deploy ReStart Consulting’s Viper360 portal to deliver a single view of patient information across the trust and community.

The trust’s head of IT John Gash told Digital Health News the portal project is part of a wider programme of work that will give the trust a substantially new infrastructure. James Paget is looking to replace its Microsoft enterprise agreement, roll-out campus-wide wi-fi, and enablemobile working via investment in tablet devices and a bring-your-own-device policy.

The two-year project, worth £2.3 million, was signed off by the trust six weeks ago. The plan is to go-live with the first phase of the portal project by December.

This will connect the patient administration system, pharmacy, pathology and radiology systems and display them through the Viper360 Patient View, along with patient demographic information. Phase one will also enable the transfer of common documents from clinicians to GPs and other partners.

Subsequent phases will see the focus shift to presenting data to partners, mobile workers and care workers and to bringing in other data from partners’ clinical systems and the NHS Summary Care Record.

Gash said when he spoke to hospital clinicians a key message was the time-consuming nature and potential clinical risk created by having to log into up to seven different systems to see what is going on with a patient.

The portal will allow one log-on to see a single patient view and, alongside the mobile access project which is running in tandem, means clinicians will be able to view this wherever and whenever they need it. “I don’t want to dictate to a clinician what device they use and where they use it. I want a certain level of freedom,” explained Gash.

He said Viper360 was chosen because of its flexibility and ReStart's willingness to work with the trust on its vision. Another factor was its ‘second generation’ technical framework, which enables real-time access direct to source systems instead of using a data repository. The consultancy says this enables a lower total cost of ownership and quicker deployment.

“The trust hasn’t got a huge amount of money so we need to make it count,” Gash said. “The trust has put a lot of faith into this because it saves money, increases through-put and reduces risk, but the crux is that it’s an opportunity for the trust to really change how it works.

“This is just the foundation piece as we want to link into personal medicine, telehealth and wearables,” he added. Gash said that while the trust IT strategy is ‘best of breed’, it is also actively engaged in evaluating electronic patient record systems as it “may decide to go down that route”.