Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust has extended the use of the existing IMS MAXIMS Patient Administration System (PAS) to include St Mary's and the Western Eye Hospitals. The system went live during early summer with the aim to ensure the integration of patient records across all of the hospital sites to produce a single PAS for the entire trust.
Created in October 2007, by the merger of St Mary's NHS Trust and Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust is one of the largest NHS trusts in the UK and the first to establish an Academic Health Science Centre (AHSC) with the Imperial College London Faculty of Medicine. With its five hospital sites, including Charing Cross Hospital, Queen Charlotte's & Chelsea Hospital, Hammersmith Hospital, St Mary's Hospital and the Western Eye Hospital, Imperial employs over 10,000 staff, offers more than 50 clinical specialities, has over 1,500 beds and treats over 1 million patients a year.
"The decision to roll out the IMS MAXIMS PAS at St Mary's and the Western Eye Hospitals was based on the fact that the system, referred to locally as ICHIS (integrated computerised hospital information system), has been used successfully at Hammersmith, Charing Cross and Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea hospitals for many years", explained Alistair Shearin, CIO Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. "For such a large trust it is critical that it has one common system, running across the disparate hospital sites, to allow the transfer of information into a single patient administration record."
"The PAS will also provide a stable platform to phase the transition towards the Trust's longer term strategic objective under the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) to implement the Cerner Millennium solution," added Shearin.
The IMS MAXIMS PAS has replaced the incumbent PAS at St Mary's and the Western Eye Hospitals which involved installing a new hardware platform and migrating the existing data onto the single PAS to support the entire trust. As part of the deployment new interfaces were built to support the existing departmental systems, at St Mary's and the Western Eye, to enable the integration of patient data from other trust sites and from across all clinical departments.
"The functionality around Patient Master Indexing was one of the key reasons for choosing to extend the deployment of the IMS MAXIMS PAS," stated Shearin. "By creating a sophisticated, unified index of patients, the system has enabled the sharing of information and processing of referrals, admissions, discharges and settlements easily and seamlessly across the trust, improving the efficiency and management of patient care."
"A further consideration was the IMS MAXIMS PAS compatibility to NPfIT current solutions and connectivity to the CfH (Connecting for Health) National Choose and Book Service. This is critical to make possible the smooth migration of data onto the Millennium solution," added Shearin. "But what has been particularly notable is the willingness and co-operative nature of IMS MAXIMS. They have certainly worked with us collaboratively to ensure the smooth roll out of the PAS."
Now that the IMS MAXIMS PAS has gone live at St Marys' and the Western Eye hospitals there are approximately 1,100 concurrent users of the system across the trust, ranging from clinical to administrative staff, administering on average over 80,000 patients per month.
"Key for St Mary's was having the ability to transition smoothly and quickly to a new PAS system which would integrate with patient data from the other trust sites," commented Elizabeth White, head of performance, information management and health records, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. "Deploying the IMS MAXIMS PAS seemed the logical decision as it was already a proven, trustworthy solution running at Hammersmith, Charing Cross and Queen Charlotte's. Plus the reliability and system ease of use, and the ability to manage and produce quality data inline with NHS data quality standards were also key."
"The partnership with IMS has always been extremely collaborative," White continued. "And this was critical for us considering our short timescales and the necessity for a team that understood our requirements around the system functionality and end user needs. Now we have gone live the trust is confident that it will have a stable, secure system that will unify, our currently held disparate data, into one integrated record of all the trust's patients."
Commenting on the extended contract with Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, Shane Tickell, IMS MAXIMS CEO stated: "As a well proven solution, this is a clear demonstration of the capability of the IMS MAXIMS PAS to support one of the largest NHS trusts in the UK. It also highlights the scalability of the solution and its ability to streamline patient data and deliver accurate information when and where required."
"This deployment is totally aligned to our strategy to develop, flexible, robust industrial strength systems that provide real solutions to support local needs, as well as delivering to match and exceed Department of Health standards, objectives and requirements," Tickell added.
About IMS MAXIMS
IMS MAXIMS specialises in developing clinical and administrative software solutions and currently supports more than 100 organisations and 20,000 users of IMS MAXIMS products.
To find out more about IMS MAXIMS and its products visit the website at www.imsmaxims.com.