Colchester live with Medway Maternity BI

Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust is the first to adopt a business intelligence suite for maternity departments developed by System C.

The hospital has implemented Medway Maternity BI, and used it to successfully submit the new Maternity Services Data Set. This has been mandated by the Health and Social Care Information Centre from 1 June.

In a statement to Digital Health News, Allan Cooke, deputy head of business intelligence at the trust, said the MSDS is “an extremely complex data set” and the new BI system is “taking care of the end to end process” for delivering it.

“Medway Maternity is a comprehensive clinical system, so extracting, mapping and coding [the data it captures] is a huge task, not to mention the validation that is required for a successful submission,” he said.

“[The implementation] means that the front-end remains clinically driven, while Medway Maternity BI satisfies the back-end coding requirements – local and national.”

Colchester Hospital implemented Medway in December 2014, to replace its old McKesson Totalcare PAS. The go-live saw it implement a new patient administration system, A&E, theatres and maternity modules.

Cooke said that it had since worked as the pilot site for the new Medway Maternity BI product, and that “multiple enhancements have been implemented at our suggestion.”

He added that the hospital is looking to continue to work closely with the company as its new system beds in, and to generate “additional analysis” from the maternity data.

The introduction of the MSDS has driven change in the maternity systems market. Vendors had to make sure that their systems conformed to the new standard by November last  year and trusts with maternity IT systems were required to submit data from the start of the financial year.

Providers without an IT system have been given an exemption. However, the introduction of the dataset is likely to push those trusts without maternity information systems to install one, as the new data set will support the Payment by Results system for maternity introduced in 2013.

System C said in a statement that Medway Maternity itself enabled hospitals to extract raw, unmapped MSDS data and create their own reports for submission to the HSCIC. But its new BI system automates this process, providing fully-coded MSDS data outputs in the xml format required by the information centre.

Marcus Bolton, the joint chief executive of System C, said: “This is a big stop in helping out customers to meet the increasingly complex and demanding national reporting requirements. It also supports their local needs by helping to improve national and strategic decision making.”

Medway Maternity is used by 19 sites in the UK, and System C said that seven were looking to go-live with the BI software over the next few weeks.