Scotland procures cardiac surgery information system

NHS Scotland has awarded the procurement of a tailored national cardiac surgery information system from Belfast firm Tomcat, which will be used for clinical reporting, scheduling and patient communication.

As well as replacing the five existing legacy systems with one modern one for recording surgery, Tomcat has also been asked to design and install a central database for recording local and national surgery information, which will be used to collect statistics about cardiac care across Scotland.

Stephen Gunning, MD at Tomcat systems, said he was very pleased with the award of the contract. "It’s certainly up the amongst the biggest contracts that we’ve had," he told E-Health Insider. Tomcat have also implemented similar cardiac surgery information systems across groups of hospitals in the Irish Republic.

"It is a credit to the hard work which has been put in by our whole team over many years," Gunning added.

"[NHS Scotland] will be starting to use the system in the hospitals first off," continued Gunning. "Certainly by early autumn we would expect the full system to be online; including the central reporting database."

Gunning also said that the system would be "capable of expansion into other areas in the future, such as PCI and angioplasty, thereby giving the possibility of one database for the complete cardiac history of each patient."

Mary Sweetland, deputy director of information services, NHS Scotland, said: "A key requirement was to integrate with our existing systems as part of our e-health strategy. We are confident Tomcat will deliver this."

Professor Jill Pell, of the Greater Glasgow Health Board, said of the proposal put forward by Tomcat: "The combination of flexibility, integration and reliability was very attractive. We are excited about implementing the new system throughout Scotland."

The system will be designed to comply with existing SCI Store system, as well as the surgery datasets used throughout the country, including the CCAD surgery dataset. The central database will be created with SQL technology, replacing the existing Access system.

The benefits which NHS Scotland are hoping to achieve through implementing the new system include easy access to information about cardiac health in Scotland, resulting in better cardiac care, and timesaving as statistics and information will be captured and collated in real-time. Hospital administration systems will link into the surgery database and the information repository.