Bridgeforward and Quicksilva partner on integration
- 13 December 2006
Software providers BridgeForward and Quicksilva have announced a partnership to focus on integrated connectivity solutions for healthcare.
BridgeForward Software, a specialist in application integration and data migration software in healthcare will partner with Quicksilva Software Solutions, which supplies spine connectivity solutions and services to the healthcare industry, will partner on integration solutions.
Under the partnership, each company will offer each other’s solutions, providing trusts, strategic health authorities, local service providers and private sector healthcare providers with one-stop, seamless connectivity solutions.
They will jointly provide health IT integration solutions ranging from departmental application integration to distributed enterprise-wide e-business solutions and NHS spine connectivity.
BridgeForward’s ClearSpan Server technology (formerly called e-Biz 2000) is claimed to be the most installed interface engine in the UK healthcare. More than 250 UK hospitals and 860 GP offices use on ClearSpan Server to provide the application integration necessary to make “best-of-breed” solutions work.
Overall BridgeForward says that it has more than 1,200 healthcare installs in the UK and 2,200 installs worldwide. Running on the Windows platform, ClearSpan Server is said to be the only integration engine that natively supports “non-invasive integration” allowing its users to integrate even the most difficult legacy systems.
According to BridgeForward, ClearSpan Server provides easy-to-use legacy system access; user-friendly adapters; drag-and-drop data mapping, and a rules-based message engine, all optimised for use by hospitals, GP practices, NHS trusts and SHAs. The system is already deployed nationally by NHS Scotland as the integration layer for the national clinical database, SCI-store.
Gina Stradis, BridgeForward’s vice president for EMEA said of the partnership with Quicksilva, “By partnering with Quicksilva, our customers in both the NHS and the private sector can now avail themselves of the best interface engine, data migration and spine connectivity solution all from a single, trusted supplier.”
Quicksilva’s Spinal Tap, is an integration tool developed to allow healthcare providers to securely and quickly plug into the NHS Spine, the corporate data backbone of the NHS. The application enables healthcare systems to meet the rigorous compliance requirements of Connecting for Health’s (CfH) programme that defines how applications must communicate with the NHS Spine.
Spinal Tap has undergone compliance testing to enable IT systems held within pharmacies and GPs to achieve compliance with the first release of the Electronic Prescriptions Service. Working with the Connecting for Health programme, Spinal Tap acts as a system interface to facilitate the electronic transfer of prescriptions, the dispensing of notifications and transmission of reimbursement claims between GPs, dispensers and the Prescription Pricing Authority.
Quicksilva says that it is currently working in a number of areas of the NHS CfH programme, including electronic transmission of prescriptions, access to the central Spine database through its Spinal Tap secure messaging engine, Choose and Book and HL7 tools and messaging applications.
Gayna Hart, managing director of Quicksilva said, “ClearSpan Server is a proven, well established interface engine solution in UK healthcare and its unique and flexible characteristics compliment our Spinal Tap offering.”
Spinal Tap handles the complexity behind the system integration required by the CfH programme. It enables any form of communications (LDAP, SOAP, ebXML) from healthcare IT systems to interact with the Spine by acting as an intelligent hub to interpret the HL7 message format that carries patient data.
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