Rotherham chooses BridgeHead

The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust has awarded a contract to BridgeHead Software to provide data and storage management as part of its wider project to implement an electronic patient record system.

The trust, which recently announced that it will push back the go-live of its Meditech EPR from November 2010 to July 2011, signed a deal with BridgeHead last October for a disaster recovery system.

It has now chosen to use the company for all of its data and storage management requirements.

David Brown, head of ICT at the trust, said: “Clearly for us and other trusts data protection, security, management and storage is absolutely critical to underpin wider IT initiatives.

“At Rotherham, our mission is to act as a spearhead to prove that technology can work to deliver benefits, both for the hospital and more importantly for the improvement in the delivery of patient care.

"This is why we are committed to developing a consolidated infrastructure with future proof solutions. Strategic partners such as Bridgehead Software have become key to achieving that.”

BridgeHead has a long standing development partnership with US company, Meditech.

It has already provided The Rotherham with its HT Backup product, in order to support the increased level of data generated by electronic patient records.

The trust is now working to implement BridgeHead’s FileStore EHR, which provides data recovery as well as ensuring that records are indexed, de-duplicated, encrypted and made fully searchable by staff.

It is also integrating BridgeHead’s MailStore, so it can archive email for more than 3,500 Microsoft Exchange users, increasing speed and freeing up storage.

Brian James, chief executive of The Rotherham, said: “This is undoubtedly one of the most sophisticated and complex implementations of an electronic patient record system anywhere in the world.

"We are successfully addressing and resolving the enormous challenges presented by our desire to implement a paperless process throughout the patient journey.”

The Rotherham was one of the first and most high-profile trusts to say that it was going outside the National Programme for IT in the NHS for an electronic patient record.

It rejected iSoft’s Lorenzo system and implementation by local service provider CSC, and instead decided to implement a £40m Meditech v6.0 system from FileTek.

James said the move was necessary to meet the financial and efficiency challenges facing the trust, and because he anticipated a rush of procurements with the end of the national programme.

The trust is now preparing to go-live in two separate phases, with the first in summer 2011 and the second to follow a year later.

Tony Cotterhill, chief executive of BridgeHead Software added: “The trust has embraced the importance of building a stronger healthcare data foundation to support their infrastructure.

“Unless you have robust and flexible solutions to manage the underlying data, hospitals run the risk of developing an application strategy that appears sound on the surface, but will eventually be compromised by ever expanding storage sub-systems.”

Link: BridgeHead Software