Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust is working with CSC to develop and deploy a full suite of next-generation laboratory products.

The trust has agreed a five-year extension of its current contract for CSC’s laboratory information system and will adopt new modules as they become available, starting with a new cellular pathology system.

The early adopter programme involves CSC and Salisbury working together to develop a new generation of blood transfusion, blood sciences, and microbiology systems.

Dr Brian Moody, laboratory manager at Salisbury, said: “The core functionality and workflow of our current CSC pathology system is very powerful, but opting for CSC’s next generation solution allowed us to use our existing products, while modernising the on-screen presentation, making the systems easier-to-use, more accessible.”

“We were attracted by the module-by-module approach as we didn’t have the resource to do a full ‘rip and replace’,” Dr Moody explained.

The pathology module offers new word processing functionality, allowing full and formatted reporting across all disciplines. The system also integrates with digital imaging solutions to display and capture detailed clinical images.

Caroline Mathews, blood transfusion laboratory manager at the trust, said she could see the potential evolution of a histopathy module being very beneficial.

“The ability to customise our screens to show multiple sets of data means we can access both patient details and haematology results making sure we are working within the correct guidelines and using blood appropriately,” she said.