St Helens and Knowsley Health Informatics Service and IMS MAXIMS have formed a partnership to offer the NHS a managed electronic patient record system.
The organisations are working together to deploy and manage a suite of clinical and administrative software products, including patient administrations systems, bed management, pathology and radiology systems and order communications.
The partners have already started bidding for work in the NHS and this spring the informatics service signed a five-year contract to manage the IMS Maxims system for a private healthcare customer.
A spokesman for the partnership said it means that NHS organisations will be able to get the expertise of a healthcare IT company, combined with the first-hand experience of an NHS team.
Director of the HIS, Neil Darvill, said the service has worked with IMS MAXIMS for more than 20 years and he believes it has a lot of experience to share with other trusts.
“In light of our success, it made complete sense to combine our deployment expertise and first-hand knowledge of what the NHS requires, with the solutions that IMS MAXIMS provides, so that we help to spread best practice working in partnership with the NHS and beyond.”
Darvill said the informatics service already does a lot of ‘meet and greets’ with other NHS organisations and has had 45 NHS trusts to visit over the past 18 months.
The service has about 150 staff, of which around half are technical, while others work on areas such as project management.
He said the timing is right to go out to the wider NHS with the offering as there is a real demand for IT systems following the demise of the National Programme for IT in the NHS.
The vibrancy of EHI Live 2012 is an indication of the opportunities in the market place, he added.
Darvill was last month announced as the Healthcare IT Champion of the Year 2012 at the EHI Awards 2012 in association with BT.
IMS MAXIMS chief executive Shane Tickell said he believes the partnership arrangement is a first for the industry.
His company does not specialise in the change management necessary for a successful EPR implementation so it makes sense to work with an organisations with experience of what it takes.
Tickell added that he hopes that working with an NHS supplier would help open doors to other organisations.
“There’s no one better than the NHS for understanding how the NHS works and their (St Helens) technical capabilities are proven,” he explained. “It’s a genuine partnership and we feel very comfortable with that.”
The HIS is a shared service hosted by the St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.