Good Hope Hospital NHS Trust has signed a contract with Siemens Healthcare Services to provide it with a new Patient Administration System (PAS). The new system will be provided as a managed service and will be based on the Oasis PAS system, supplied by Siemens partner, Capula Elan.
Features of the Oasis PAS systems to be installed include: a master patient index, clinical management, booking, waiting list management, case notes tracking, admitted patient care and bed management, clinical coding and enterprise wide scheduling.
The Oasis PAS will replace the ageing current Siemens IRC PAS system and is expected to be used by up to 200 staff across the trust. Siemens Healthcare Services say benefits of the new system will include improved administrative functions, especially allowing better scheduling of appointment times and better tracking of case notes. This will help to ensure case notes are where they need to be, when they need to be there.
Dr John Heavens, head of IM&T at the trust, explained why Siemens had been chosen: “It was obvious to me that Siemens were in this market for the long-term, and that they are likely to be major players in the provision of a national system, so in that respect it was the safe choice. “
Dr Heavens added that integration between the PAS and hospital EPR system was a key factor. The Oasis system supplied by Capula Elan uses Oracle technology, the same technology used by the trust for its in-house developed electronic patient record (EPR) system.
“The age of our old PAS makes the integration with our EPR difficult,” explained Dr Heavens, “In addition the trust has been experiencing significant reliability problems as the age of the hardware meant it was starting to fail and it is no longer supported by its primary supplier.”
Integration of the new Oasis PAS system with the hospital’s new e-booking system is expected to allow rapid roll-out to GPs, enabling real team electronic referrals and bookings across the health economy.
“This is going to be a significant improvement over the old system,” explained Dr Heavens. “Electronic booking will mean patients will know as soon as possible when the appointment is.”