Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Trust in North-west England has deployed a new clinical workstation system which provides acute care summary records across four hospitals and an outpatient clinic.
The trust is using Orion Health’s Clinical Integration Framework – a software platform for creating integrated electronic health records across organisation. Users view the records using the web-based Concerto platform.
The system, which covers a patient population of 300,000 and has 1,000 registered users, was deployed in three months. The implementation, testing and go-live of the solution was undertaken by a joint team from the trust and Orion Health from April to July 2007. The system is live across all trust sites and full enterprise roll-out is continuing.
Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Trust’s head of IM&T, Tony Rich, said: “Concerto provided an extremely flexible framework for this project. It made migration and integration of data very simple, and allowed us to implement, test and roll out the clinical workstation very rapidly.
“In addition, the Orion Health architecture has provided us with a solid foundation on which we can easily add new functionality and integrate with other clinical systems over time to meet the rapidly growing needs of the trust.”
The trust already uses Orion Health’s Rhapsody Integration Engine for electronic clinical messaging between information systems.
The new clinical workstation currently offers access to lab results, ability to create TTO (To Take Out Prescriptions) discharge summaries, and access to referrals. In total, 100 medical secretaries at the trust are using the workstation to create clinic letters.
The next planned phase of roll-out of the workstation is to make the portal available to local GP practices during 2007. GPs will be given role-based access to clinical data about their patients.
Rich added: “Because Concerto is browser-based, it has zero footprint on client machines, and allows the trust to quickly add new data and order sets as we expand the clinical workstation into the future.”
Orion says that the deployment of the Concerto clinical portal is a key step in the trust’s long-term ICT strategy to become a “future-enabled” trust as the system provides the user interface for the web-based clinical workstation that can be used by clinical staff across all sites, as well as in primary care settings.
Among specific plans for the next 12 months, Orion and the trust are looking at the deployment of a rapid patient discharge tool, electronic drug boards for prescribing and
dispensing on the ward, plus a pilot of selected workstation functions on handheld devices.
Orion announced the news from the World of Health I.T. Conference and Exhibition, taking place in Vienna, Austria, this week.
Links