Sheffield Children’s NHS Trust has chosen a Stalis CareXML enterprise-wide patient data respository as the foundation for integrating its patient-based IT systems and moving towards the NHS Care Record Service (NCRS). An announcement from Stalis said that the move will help the trust to integrate data from a number of legacy systems around the organisation, which delivers both acute and community child health services. The trust’s initial requirement was to extract data from a legacy PAS and combine this with data from the community child health system. This involved solving common problems associated with disparate systems such as duplication of patients and various inconsistencies in the data However, the trust’s IM&T manager, Russell Banks commented that the procurement had also brought the unexpected benefit of an early start down the path towards NCRS, the national records system to be implemented across England under the National Programme for IT. The trust hopes that the initiative, though an interim solution, will transform its data into a more manageable state when the time comes to introduce the national applications. Stalis managing director, Christine Whitehouse, commented: “We see this project as something of a beacon that will hopefully display to other trusts the wisdom of getting their data integrated and prepared for when their local service providers are ready to transfer them top their new care records service applications.”
