Digital Health’s monthly roundup of contracts and go lives

Our latest roundup of contracts and go lives features news from Northern Ireland, whose digital pathology project went live with Sectra.

Homerton University Hospital signs eTriage deal to tackle waiting times

We start with news from the middle of February, where Homerton University Hospital rolled-out a new electronic check-in service, combining eTriage by eConsult Health with Cerner’s Millennium electronic patient record (EPR) system.

The aim of the service is to help the hospital meet the government-set target of accessing walk-in patients within 20 minutes. It is hoped the combination of eTriage and the Millennium EPR will help to speed up the process of prioritising as well as triaging patients, in turn reducing waiting times and improving patient safety.

The eTriage system will ensure that those patients requiring urgent medical attention are immediately flagged within the hospital’s EPR to ensure prompt treatment. It also frees up clinical time, allowing nurses to focus on communicating with patients.

The end-to-end system can process 250 walk-in patients per day, with a projected average completion time of 5.4 minutes, based on data of patient journeys using eTriage.

Barnsley Hospital teams up with several partners for EDMS project

As February progressed, we saw Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust team up with System C, IMMJ Systems and Iron Mountain for a project which will see more than 180,000 medical records scanned into an Electronic Document Management System (EDMS).

The trust went live with IMMJ Systems’ MediViewer EDMS in Rheumatology in early September 2021 but the solution is now live across most specialities. MediViewer is able to integrate with the Trust’s System C Careflow.

Clinical and clerical users are able to view the complete history for each patient attending the Trust and search through the record for key clinical documents via the MediViewer SmartIndexing technology.

South London hospital trusts to implement a joint Cerner EPR

The two trusts within the St George’s and Epsom and St Helier Hospitals group have partnered with Cerner to provide a shared EPR system, allowing clinical teams to access patient information and records, irrespective of where care is provided across the group.

It also enables more effective working with health and care partners including neighbouring hospitals, with the potential for benefits to be scaled across the south west London integrated care system.

It will replace the dated clinical and administrative systems currently in place at Epsom and St Helier and is the largest scale digital project the two trusts, who serve a population of approximately 2.5million people across four sites, have rolled out since becoming a group in August 2021.

Northern Ireland goes live with Sectra for unified medical imaging system

As February neared its conclusion, we saw the news that Northern Ireland’s digital pathology project went live, which sees pathology and radiology images and reports being combined in a single medical imaging system.

The region will be the first in the UK to combine pathology and radiology images and reports in this way and it is hoped the system will modernise and digitise diagnostics for healthcare professionals and patients.

With the region’s pathologists performing around 40 million diagnostic tests every year, the digital system has been implemented across four Health and Social Care trusts in Northern Ireland, meaning pathologists can instantly access high quality digital images from almost anywhere.

The implementation of the digital pathology project was supported by medical imaging supplier Sectra, with workloads and turnaround times already being impacted by the new system.

Tallaght University Hospital goes live with new Kainos EPR

The beginning of March saw Tallaght University Hospital in Dublin go live with a new EPR with the aim of improving the flow of information within its healthcare services.

Provided by Kainos, the Synergy EPR has been implemented to support Tallaght’s strategic goal of creating a ‘hospital without walls’ and ensure latest patient information is available across the hospital and its multiple locations, helping to improve patient care.

Via the record, healthcare staff at Tallaght can access a single view of each patient to examine and review test results, medications, discharge summaries and more from all departments involved in a patient’s healthcare journey.

Synergy is based on the Evolve Cloud platform and was developed in partnership with Kainos. The digital technology company developed the platform to enable its customers to adopt cloud-based solutions in healthcare, in alignment with the Government Public Service ICT Strategy and adoption of cloud services.

Herefordshire and Worcestershire partner with Better for electronic prescribing

Finally, Herefordshire and Worcestershire Health and Care NHS Trust has selected Better to deliver an electronic prescribing and medication administration (EPMA) solution across its mental health recovery units and community hospitals.

The Trust was looking for a supplier to integrate its EPMA solution into the existing EPR system and community patient management software. Better Meds, designed to enhance efficiency, transparency and decision-making support, was able to provide this along with the ability to deploy the solution quickly and have an end-of-life functionality.

The procurement will fulfil the last of the Trust’s obligations as a Global Digital Exemplar and marks a significant step forward in its digital transformation.