The Situation
Over the last 15 years our client has grown from 70 consultants to a Trust with over 250 consultants with general and specialist services continuing to expand and grow in line with need. General hospital services are now provided to 300,000 people living in the local area and specialist services for around 1.5 million people living in the wider area.
Our client is one of many Trusts facing the challenges of meeting aggressive integration targets set by the Connecting for Health (CfH) national programme. As the Trust moved towards the adoption of a Local Service Provider (LSP) solution, the existing system architecture represented a serious risk and cost to the Trust. The linking of over thirty different applications in a clinical environment directly with a completely new Patient Administration System (PAS) hosted by the LSP would be a timely and costly integration process with significant risks to system availability and patient safety.
With WCI’s successful experience of integration projects and clinical systems within the NHS, the recommendation was to implement a Trust Integration Engine (TIE) as an intermediate stage to reduce technical complexity and risk whilst offering the Trust far greater flexibility to respond to the changing clinical and technical requirements.
The Solution
WCI’s integration experience covers a wide range of integration software and solutions and recommendations were made to best fit the Trust’s existing technical environment and to protect existing investment.
For their new integration architecture a hub and spoke model was adopted as a new integration strategy. This would bring together all the necessary clinical systems and support HL7, as the national standard for interoperability of clinical messaging and provide resilience to minimise any downtime.
The Trusts existing architecture included a PAS with a large number of connected systems which had grown to maximum levels. The first stage of the integration strategy was to link the TIE with the existing PAS as a stable ‘staging’ environment so that gradual migration of all the downstream systems could take place.
A Local Patient Index (LPI) was created and synchronised with the PAS, giving more control of the data and more options when adding new interfaces in the future. This LPI was created and provided the scalability to address future data flow requirements and also the Trust’s in-house team were already familiar with the technology. The architecture provided further new interfaces to be developed including a new desktop synchronisation with the PAS via an HL7 PMI interface and synchronisation of the Trusts PMI to their Radiology Management system, also implemented using HL7.
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NHSTrustIntegrationcasestudy.pdf