Blog

Prestigious UK IT Group Intellect Agrees On The Need For An ‘End To Silos’ In NHS Informatics

13

“If you think about it, the NHS deals with over a million patients every 36 hours and over 250 million interactions a year. Is a paper and postage system that can take months the most effective way of providing care today? In any other industry that volume of interaction would be ripe for digital transformation.”

This is a quote from an expert called Jon Lindberg, who is associate director for healthcare at Intellect, the official ‘trade body’ of the entire UK IT industry, representing over 800 member companies who collectively contribute 10% to the entire national GDP.

The quote is from a blog he wrote last week called, ‘A digital health service we deserve’. In it, he summarises some of the main themes from a new Intellect study that addresses the self-same issues we have looked at in our series of blogs: how to use technology in one part of the NHS that we know works and extend it to help other areas, in order to moving to the kind of ‘paperless NHS’ the DoH has made an official target.

According to the Intellect report, The NHS Information Evolution patient information is “buried deep in silos.” What is needed is a practical set of solutions that will unlock the data and make it truly portable, open up the NHS to a wider range of technology providers; as well as introduce the mobile and connected technologies a 21st century health service is looking for.

The NHS needs to modernise, but to get there the NHS must do two things: punch holes through those silos of information, while simultaneously push for more open standards.

Key to all this is a new take on the underlying information architecture of the NHS. For too long, says the study, systems and services designed and implemented locally often work well, but end up burying information, making it inaccessible to those on the outside. A much better idea is an architecture that allows information to flow horizontally and follow the patient.

This looks to be a very useful new approach. I am also pleased that Intellect has picked up on the same cues we have spotted – which is to use PACS standards as the basis for a new form of EPR based on the proven Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) approach. In Intellect’s case, it has a wider remit, so addressing more than one ‘silo’ – but the idea is the same: the route to national NHS IT systems that work is to go bottom up, but with a strategic goal in mind.

What do you think? Could this work in your Trust?

‘Royal’ Approval for VNA-Based EPR

07

The deployment of a VNA (vendor neutral archive) based platform as a first step to a proper, working EPR (electronic patient record) at a major Liverpool hospital  is definitely a first for British health informatics.

Let’s look in a bit more detail at what shaped this decision by the pioneering Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust.

The driver for considering VNA was, notably, not anything to do with building an EPR. In fact, it was much more prosaic – it was due to the need to replace an ageing PACS imaging system.

That need became more acute in the period when the NHS Connecting for Health National Programme for IT was introduced, says the Royal. Its response: its technology upgrade might need to go much wider.

The Trust decided on a truly open platform so it could go beyond the scope of PACS and store and manage other content alongside medical images. “To maximise the benefits, we decided to integrate our VNA plans with our electronic document and records management strategy, using the same infrastructure,” is the view of the Trust’s CIO, James Norman.

You will understand what a privilege it us for us to work with the Trust’s team. The Trust is one of the top NHS teaching institutions in the UK, with well-established links to the University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University and international institutions. Each year the Trust sees more than half a million people in its outpatient department and it deals with around 150,000 emergency patients and day case admissions. So the fact that this size of NHS Trust has selected our technology to meet its future plans is a genuine honour.

The Trust, incidentally, selected our VNA because of our experience and our unique relationship with IT giant EMC – the acknowledged market leader in enterprise document management. We have enormous experience with its system, the Documentum Enterprise Content Management suite.

We hope this engagement is the first of many examples of using VNA as the way to a true EPR. Something tells me it is – even though there is a lot of work to do in order to get there.

Why Does VNA Matter – and How Do You Identify it?

08

 

In this series of blogs we’ve been arguing that a Vendor-Neutral Archive (VNA) approach – where VNA needs to be read as describing a medical imaging system that can support the exchange of medical image content, however and wherever it has been generated – is a highly promising new way of thinking about building common NHS-wide electronic medical records, which the National Programme failed to do.