Healthcare IT news in brief

Barts consolidates LIMS

Barts Health NHS Trust has appointed CliniSys to unify the three WinPath laboratory information system systems currently in use across its sites after Whipps Cross University Hospital NHS Trust and Newham University Hospital NHS Trust merged with Barts and The London NHS Trust in 2012. Since then, Barts has been serviced by three separate WinPath systems on three individual databases and so has asked CliniSys to implement WinPath Enterprise, their Network optimised LIMS, to address the issues inherent in operating disparate systems and to unify the service on a single IT platform.  This will not only enable the move to increased standardisation and quality of processes but will also provide full access to all patient data across all laboratory locations no matter where the tests are performed. 

Primary care news

Microtest launches Open Evolution

Microtest has launched ‘Open Evolution’ – a turnkey solution, which allows collaborating and federating practices to share medical records across the group. Open Evolution allows a patient to attend any practice within a group or federation, supported by a full, real time, read/write medical record being available for use. The solution also has a flexible reporting mechanism, which enables management information to be viewed per individual practice, for practices to be compared against others in the group or for the group to be reported as a whole. Open Evolution will provide fully integrated working, regardless of the clinical system used by any one practice and is expected to fully integrate with all systems by September 2016.

New protocol released to prevent antibiotic over-prescribing

TPP has made the Treating Your Infection resource available directly from patients’ records. The leaflet, produced by Public Health England and the Royal College of GPs to help combat antimicrobial resistance, is now available in a new protocol for GPs using SystmOne. When the clinician launches the protocol the leaflet is printed with the patient’s name merged on to it, as well as a QR code which can be scanned by the patient’s smartphone – giving them online access to the advice. It provides self-care information and explains the importance of avoiding inappropriate antibiotic prescribing.

Falls risk tool freely available online

UK healthcare professionals have free access to a new Emis web protocol and template developed by Walsall CCG in partnership with Keele University to help identify patients at risk of falls. The toolkit allows users to search for read codes consistent with predictors of falls risk as recommended by NICE and high risk psychotropic medicines which can contribute to falls. It can also identify patients over the age of 65 who may benefit from a medication review or falls assessment  and prompt background alerts to systematically identify ‘at risk’ patients. In tests the toolkit was estimated to identify around 300 at-risk patients in a CCG of 280,000.

Deployments

Analytics enhances employee case management at Western Sussex

Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with a new service to enhance its employee relations case management called ER Tracker from Software Europe. It will be used by around 10 employee relations case workers, with the aim of being able to better analyse case loads for trends and blockages in progress, improve speed and quality of reporting to managers and employees, make compliance with policy and Freedom of Information requests easier, and enable greater communication on cases between team members. The trust currently uses an Excel spreadsheet to track around 1,200 cases per year, which can only be accessed consecutively, by one case worker at a time. 

HSCIC gets KnowledgeKube procurement system 

KnowledgeKube has delivered a procurement system for the Health and Social Care Information Centre. Budget cuts over recent years have meant staffing levels in the procurement team have been reduced by two thirds and pressure on the remaining team meant it needed to digitally automate its process. KnowledgeKube turned what was a previously manual process into a fully digitised end-to-end procurement system capable of managing the whole IT purchasing process. This includes aggregating up to 30 different ‘live’ data sources to deliver a bespoke catalogue of up to 10,000 products, including specialist bundled items.  This has saved HSCIC 75% in procurement time, reducing admin costs by more than 50%.