Barts and The London NHS Trust has selected InterSystems’ Ensemble universal integration platform to integrate systems at its three hospitals in East London and the City.
Ensemble will be used on a range of projects at the three prestigious London hospitals – The Royal London Hospital, St Bartholomew’s Hospital and The London Chest Hospital – as well as providing the basis for integration with the new NHS Care Records Service (NHS CRS).
NHS CRS is the key component of the £6.2 billion NHS IT modernisation project, based on the creation of a national database of shared electronic patient records. The service will ultimately connect more than 30,000 GPs and 270 trusts to national systems that will support appointments, prescribing and access to summary medical records.
Barts and The London NHS Trust is scheduled to be an early adopter of the regional NHS CRS solution, based on IDX’s Carecast clinical software, being delivered in London by the Capital Care Alliance, led by BT. London is one of five regions under the English NHS IT modernisation programme.
Mike Eagles, head of software development at Barts and The London, said: “We chose Ensemble for many reasons, but what really sets it apart, is that it is much quicker, and more easy to use than other products. We need to develop and integrate solutions much more quickly than in the past. Ensemble helps us to do this.”
Like many trusts, Barts and The London has a substantial investment in its existing legacy systems. The trust’s in-house teams have considerable expertise in the development and integration of operational healthcare systems.
The trust will use Ensemble to help it rapidly develop new solutions based on existing operational systems. One of the first projects to use Ensemble will be to take data from existing HL7 messages created by the current radiology information system and use them to create reports that can be provided to GPs.
“We are delighted with this latest Ensemble project in a major NHS trust,” said Duncan Allen, Sales Manager at InterSystems. “There is clearly a need for powerful and flexible integration technology that can deliver rapid integration whilst making best use of scarce NHS resources.”
Allen told E-Health insider that to enable the trust to connect to NHS CRS Intersystems had contracted to build and provide dedicated adaptors from Ensemble to CRS. "We’ve contracted to provide them with a CRS adaptor for the London CRS." Intersystems says it will build other CRS adaptors where these are needed by Ensemble customers.
Allen concluded: “Ensemble can help Trusts get maximum value out of existing solutions, deliver new local initiatives and be ready to connect to the new regional systems.” Barts and the London is the fifth Ensemble customer in the NHS.
The solution is claimed to be the only application integration platform to incorporate the functionality of integration and application servers, a high performance database, and a unified development and management environment in a single, architecturally seamless product.