Airedale live with TPP

Airedale NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with SystmOne’s new acute functionality with data hosted by CSC.

TPP and Accenture signed a three-year agreement with Airedale to implement TPP’s hospital system earlier this year.

The trust told eHealth Insider the contract did not go out to OJEU because the total value was under the threshold, which is £113,000 for supplies or services.

They have now deployed the SystmOne patient administration system across the trust along with an A&E system and bed management functionality in the Medical Admissions Unit.

The PAS was switched on overnight last Sunday followed by the A&E functionality on Wednesday. The trust’s iPM PAS has been switched off.

“Staff from TPP and Accenture were on hand throughout the deployment process and will continue to shadow staff on the wards and monitor progress over the coming weeks,” a TPP statement said.

Airedale will now begin planning for the roll-out of order communications, e-prescribing and e-discharge functionality across the hospital in 2013.

SystmOne works with just one electronic care record. It is already used by about 80 general practices, 10 palliative care organisations and more than 100 community services in the Bradford and Airedale region.

TPP clinical director Dr John Parry said introducing acute functionality seemed like the logical way forward for the company to achieve integration across care systems.

“Strategically it’s very important. We are able to capitalise on the experience of the last 14 years because we have the architectural structures to deliver a single patient record in a multiple care context,” he said.

Dr Parry said TPP will continue to develop its acute offering, but will be pursuing more work “in the very near future.”

“I’m absolutely sure that there’s an affordability gap in the market in that some of the major systems are very expensive, but this is also unique because of the integration of primary care data with secondary care. This should produce a revolution of connected care,” he added.

TPP has successfully migrated 500,000 of the trust’s patient records into the system and all data will be hosted securely by CSC.

“I can already in my GP record see a particular patient has had several admissions for treatment for their cancer, but I can also see upcoming appointments. That’s a huge leap forward in terms of joint management of patients,” Dr Parry explained.

He said CSC runs the data centres, but does not monitor or maintain the servers or deliver software to the servers.

“The hosting of the servers doesn’t preclude work with other partners,” he said.

“We do foresee working with partners like Accenture in the future and do foresee packages that will enable benefits to be realised quickly within the term of the contract to make it affordable.”

Airedale has more than 450 beds and around 3000 staff.