Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust has successfully installed an enterprise integration engine able to support interfaces in multiple medical terminologies.
While integration engines can typically take three months to implement the trust was able to complete its installation of Ensemble in just four weeks.
The InterSystems Ensemble interface engine will provide trust-level integration for its 15 existing legacy systems. It also provides the foundations to ensure integration and interoperability of new systems planned by the trust.
Ensemble translates HL7 messages between the old Clinicom patient administration system (PAS) and 15 different medical systems, including Radiology, Laboratory, Theatres, A&E and Pharmacy. All of the 15 interfaces required
As part of the deployment InterSystems developed, tested, and deployed 15 interfaces in four weeks enabling messages to be translated and communicated between different systems.
Mike Casey, IT director at Mid-Essex, told E-Health Insider. “The requirement was to put in place a trust-wide integration engine that will connect our existing systems and the multiple medical systems we will be introducing over the next six months, including pathology.”
Casey explained that a key requirement of the integration engine was to enable different medical languages to communicate including HL7.
The links such as that to A&E are based on sophisticated bi-directional links, interrogating and interpreting messages as they enter and leave the system, enabling free flow of messages between systems.
Casey described the trust–level integration as “the pre-cursor to a lot of other implementations planned by the trust”, including picture archiving and communications (PACS), pathology and order communications.
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