Calderdale and Huddersfield extends home grown PAS

Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust has extended its existing home grown patient administration system (PAS) from one site to three hospitals in just four months.

The trust was able to extend the PAS system which is now used in all areas of the three hospitals using InterSystems Cache integration engine.

Previously the foundation trust been operating with different PAS systems at its various sites – the Calderdale Royal Hospital in Halifax, the Huddersfield Royal Infirmary and St Luke’s Hospital in Huddersfield.

According to InterSystems Cache the foundation trust has improved its ability to manage its business more effectively and meet its NHS targets.

Working with different PAS systems resulted in duplicate patient records, repeated data entry and a burden for staff that needed to work at more than one site. As a new foundation trust hospital, Calderdale and Huddersfield needed to ensure that new statutory reporting commitments could be met. Continued use of disparate systems would make it difficult to meet these reporting commitments.

The trust worked with the SHA, Connecting for Health and its LSP to determine that the implementation of a single unified PAS could deliver significant benefits to the organisation, until CfH products are available to support it.

The Calderdale Royal Hospital site was already running a successful locally developed PAS solution based on database technology from InterSystems. As the trust was satisfied that this solution had the capability to extend into a multi-site deployment it decided to standardise across all its sites.

Users now have a single solution, which will help reduce the duplication of records and improve the validation and management of critical patient information.

The single PAS also presents an opportunity to simplify the inventory of interfaces to other hospital systems, and finally realise the goal of having a single reporting source for statutory reporting.

Originally the PAS running at the Halifax site was implemented on a UNIX server system. As part of the multi-site implementation, the use of Caché has enabled the application to be quickly migrated to a high-availability MS Windows server environment.

The trust can now run its total PAS workload on an inexpensive modern server platform, cutting the total cost of ownership and reducing the ongoing support burden for the trust’s IT staff.

John Rayner, head of the health informatics service said, “As well as the current benefits we are getting from Caché, this environment also provides potential future benefits. For example, we have the option to use the enhanced interoperability within Caché to make the PAS Choose and Book compliant.”

Diane Whittingham, CEO of Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust, concluded, “Being able to manage our business more effectively, with greater compliance to NHS standards and increased productivity, is a real boost to the entire trust.”

Graham Frost, managing director for InterSystems Northern Europe, said: “There are many existing systems with rich functionality that are delivering value to NHS end-users. We are delighted that this project shows how such solutions can continue to play a positive role going forward.”

He added: “The standardisation onto Caché revitalises the trust’s PAS environment by providing a number of benefits. These include much greater performance and scalability, access to modern hardware platforms, and connectivity to other applications in the hospital.”