The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust has extended use of its EuroKing Miracle maternity software to support all four of its hospitals – The Royal Oldham Hospital, Rochdale Infirmary, North Manchester General Hospital and Fairfield General Hospital in Bury.
The move to the enterprise-wide maternity system was driven by Pennine’s need to increase standardisation and minimise disruption following the merger of the four hospitals into one trust. Prior to the merger, three of the hospitals had each developed their own bespoke maternity implementations based on EuroKing Miracle, while North Manchester, had no obstetric system in place at all.
By moving to a single trust-wide system Pennine hospitals wanted to enable staff at the trust to provide complete continuity of care from the mother’s first visit to the antenatal clinic, to delivery of the baby, and through to eventual discharge.
The trust runs the hospitals in Oldham, Bury, Rochdale and North Manchester, serving a population of 800,000 residents across the North East of Greater Manchester. A total of 10,000 women a year give birth in its hospitals.
The new trust-wide system, which uses the InterSystems Caché post-relational database, should provide greater consistency across its sites and generate more detailed reports and provide. By making key information more easily available to all staff involved in providing maternity care expectant and new mothers should no longer have to answer the same questions at each stage of their journey, and staff can concentrate on providing improved care.
All maternity data is now stored on a single server making it accessible to all authorised users across the four hospitals. If a mother has previously had children in different hospitals within the trust, or has visited a number of different antenatal clinics during a single pregnancy, care staff will have immediate access to all appropriate records.
To upgrade to the new maternity system, the three hospitals already using a version of the Miracle system first consolidated their data into a single consistent database of care records. The final step was then to implement the system at the North Manchester Maternity Unit.
From the IT team’s perspective, having a true web-based solution hosted on a centralised server located at North Manchester Hospital means that the solution can be deployed to all necessary users with a reduced IT support workload. Client PCs now require only standard desktop assistance, with no complex software to support.
John Lindars, divisional director for women and children’s services at The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “Now that we have rolled out this first phase of the implementation, we want to look at other ways we can use the system. For example, we are keen to expand it out to additional outposts within the community, such as community midwives, through the use of web-enabled handheld devices, for example.”
“Projects such as this demonstrate the true power that InterSystems Caché brings to our solution,” said Jonathan Raife, Managing Director at EuroKing Miracle. “Caché has enabled us to build Pennine’s application quickly and to provide the deep functionality required for this critically important user-community.”
Phil Birchall, director of healthcare business development at InterSystems, said: “We are delighted to be associated with this project and extend our congratulations to both Pennine and EuroKing Miracle on this successful implementation.”
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