System C Healthcare, Microsoft®, Orion Health and Liquidlogic have joined forces to produce the first health and social care link under NHS Connecting for Health's (CfH) new standards for systems integration.
This link is an important step in the national drive to improve collaboration between healthcare providers and social services teams.
The solution takes a patient's discharge summary created on System C's Medway PAS/EPR system and sends it within an electronic message to Liquidlogic's PROTOCOL Integrated Adults' System (IAS) via the Orion Rhapsody Integration Engine.
Microsoft's Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator (CDSA) for Microsoft Office®, running inside Medway, renders discharge information and supports the population of additional data items (such as medications) and encoding of clinical terms, before generating the required message.
The discharge summary is based on guidelines from the Royal College of Physicians and contains details of a patient’s admission, presenting complaints, procedures undergone, discharge prescription, follow-up notes and so on.
"Under a paper-based system, it can take up to 2 or 3 weeks for the information to be transmitted, by which time a patient could have undergone 3 episodes of care in the community without the care provider necessarily having a clear picture of their status," said Denise Harrison, Sales and Marketing Director at Liquidlogic. "This solution will improve this significantly."
NHS Trusts have been told that from 1 April this year they should be delivering discharge summaries to GP practices within 24 hours of a patient leaving hospital.
"This is an exciting step forward in the real integration of care across organisational boundaries," said Dr Ian Denley, chief executive of System C. "Linking disparate systems in this way to provide a simple discharge summary is going to make an immediate impact on the quality of care, on prevention and on institutional efficiency."
"It's also a powerful demonstration of suppliers working quickly and efficiently together for a common cause."
The standards form part of the CfH Interoperability Toolkit (ITK) for integrating computer systems between different care providers and Spine and non-Spine accredited systems. CfH published the toolkit in January, and set a deadline of 31 March for proof of concept witness testing.
The System C, Orion Health, Microsoft and Liquidlogic consortium passed formal testing on Tuesday this week.
"The primary goal of a discharge summary is to enable a smooth handover of care from the acute care setting to providers working in community, social or primary care so that appropriate follow-up care can be given to the patient," said Anne O'Hanlon, Technical Account Manager for Orion Health.
"As a member of HL7, Orion Health actively supports health IT standards development and has relished the opportunity to demonstrate how quick and easy it is in Rhapsody to achieve cross-organisational interoperability using the new ITK web services."
Andy Payne, CDSA Program Manager at Microsoft, commented: "The Interoperability Toolkit initiative has been a great vehicle to show how the functionality of the Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator (CDSA) for Microsoft Office, enables our customers and partners to produce clinically encoded, interoperable documents using the trusted, familiar document creation tools provided in Microsoft Office.
"The ease of the CDSA's integration into System C's Medway PAS/EPR system has been a great validation of the work we've undertaken in producing the CDSA," he added.
The Interoperability Toolkit initiative was set up to increase the momentum of the National Programme for IT by opening the healthcare market to new technological developments from a wider pool of suppliers.
CfH's aim is to help trusts make better use of vital information held in their core systems in a way which meets their local needs at the same time as taking advantage of the latest market developments.
Related news articles:
- System C Healthcare's Profile
About System C Healthcare plc
System C Healthcare plc (www.systemc.com) specialises in the provision of health and social care information systems, systems implementation and consulting services.
System C Healthcare is quoted on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange (SYS.L).
About Liquidlogic
Liquidlogic, a member of the System C Healthcare plc group of companies, creates multi agency systems that enable organisations to share information and collaborate efficiently when delivering public services to individuals. Liquidlogic's systems underpin care delivered to children, the elderly and other adults with complex needs. More than 200 NHS Primary Care Trusts, Hospitals and Social Care organisations use Liquidlogic systems to coordinate their joint activities to ensure services are as joined up as possible for these vulnerable groups.
Since 2006 Liquidlogic has gained 20 per cent of the Children's Services market and is at the forefront in delivering collaborative IT systems that support the Government's Personalisation Agenda.
System C acquired Liquidlogic to facilitate a joint vision to ensure health services are better joined up, care is more accessible and integrated, and patients have more control and choice over how they receive their care. The expanded group is the first major company in the UK market to specialise in both health and social services solutions.
Please visit www.liquidlogic.co.uk for further information.