St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has chosen Logica to provide the Paris system to support child health and community services in the North West.
The Paris shared record system will be used primarily as a case management system to support two North West PCTs; NHS Halton and St Helens and NHS Knowsley.
Implementation of Paris will be carried out during 2010 and will provide sharable electronic child health records across the two PCTs. Once implemented, the new system will enable children’s health records to be tracked from birth through to education.
NHS staff will be able to manage medical issues, immunisation requirements and health alerts more effectively.
Once in place, the system will also continue to advance record keeping and workflow in other community health services, enabling the PCTs to work more closely together for improved service provision.
The new Paris system will replace a variety of paper systems and Comwise systems dating back 20-plus years.
Later stages of the project will see links established with local education services and national NHS systems including Choose and Book.
Paul Goss, senior consultant, e-health, for Logica, told EHI the PCTs will gain the benefits of a shared common system that is “partitioned” to severely limit the number of clinicians able to view the records of children not registered to their PCT.
“It’s a single partitioned database that includes a central data entry function,” explained Goss. The implementation will include roles-based access.
The procurement was carried out by the local health informatics service, based within St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.
Logica will act as prime contractor in the deal, sub-contracting Civica Health and Social Care to provide its Paris system, developed by the specialist software developer In4Tek – acquired by Civica in 2009.
Logica and Civica will provide implementation, data migration, and other technical services including training on user designed screens and reports. The project is due to be completed in 2010.
Neil Darvill, director of informatics at St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “We wanted to make better use of the existing data and relationships that we had.
"Plus at the same time, to build a scalable system that would allow us to increase interaction and sharing across the different divisions of the trusts and within the local community.”
He said the new system will allow the PCTs to improve current work processes, while managing future child and community health more effectively, “through better planning, tracking, and referral and escalation of cases."
Chris George, director of Health and Devolved Government at Logica, concluded: “Technology has enabled care services to become increasingly collaborative.”
Links: Logica