Sheffield Children's NHS Trust: data cleansing, integration and migration

Background

Sheffield Children’s NHS Trust is one of a handful of dedicated children’s hospitals in the UK. It is a regional centre of excellence with national and international specialties.

The hospital was established in 1876 and moved to its current site in 1902, and it provides specialist care from birth to 16 years of age. The primary catchment area is the North Trent region but it also receives patients referred from all over the UK and internationally.

Sheffield Children’s NHS Trust contains a unique combination of facilities, expertise, specialist care and understanding. The hospital is intensely proud of its pioneering work and enjoys generous support in Sheffield from local people, industry and commerce in a wide variety of ways.

There are nine wards ranging from a specialist paediatric intensive care unit to day Care through medical and surgical specialities. The four operating theatres perform more than twenty operations each day and the accident & emergency department is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Each year Sheffield Children's NHS Trust cares for around 19,000 inpatients, 74,000 outpatients and more than 410,000 A&E admissions. The trust employs over 1,500 staff on multiple sites and has undergone many building changes and additions over the years.

Alongside the hospital, community paediatrics and child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) have been brought under the management of the trust in recent years to develop a more integrated child health capability.

All of the work of the Sheffield Children's NHS Trust is focused on keeping the organisation at the forefront of paediatric care and bringing real benefits to all young patients who need the specialist services of the trust.

In providing an integrated child health capability the trust became aware that they needed to integrate various disparate healthcare information systems that they had acquired over the years, including the trust’s PAS, to improve data quality and to provide clinicians and staff with a single integrated patient record.

Russell Banks, the trust’s head of information management & technology services explained: “Some of the systems were based on older ‘closed’ technologies such as MUMPS and we knew that we had to deal with major issues around record duplication. The solution needed to provide demographic data to the trust’s existing departmental systems.

“This alone would require specialised services from a supplier with considerable experience of NHS process and practices and more importantly in-depth domain knowledge, if we were going to be able to unlock, and access as well as clean the data.

“The system chosen needed to fully address our needs for a scalable solution, one that could deliver the benefits of fast, accurate and timely information to all of our users. The system also needed to offer data interrogation, extraction and manipulation tools to facilitate the demanding reporting requirements to support the specialised services that the Trust provides,” he added.

“To select our new solution we undertook a thorough competitive analysis of the market, comparing the industry’s leading suppliers against exacting criteria. As the evaluation and subsequent implementation represented a major investment of the trust’s time and financial resources, we also sought commitment from suppliers to ensure that the chosen solution would be maintained and developed into the future and thus continue to protect the trust’s investment, delivering best practice as well as the best value for money.”

The solution

Following their extensive evaluation, the trust chose to implement products and services from the Stalis CareXML suite.

CareXML utilises automated options to process data from any source system on demand and then to perform merging, matching and validation functions and to aid medical records and information management staff in recognising poor quality and potentially duplicate data.

The benefits

Russell Banks commented: “There are many benefits of the solution, both for the staff and the patients. Stalis facilitate the technical aspects and maintenance of the system. This means that, through the integration of patient records, our staff are able to fully concentrate their efforts on data quality. Patients also benefit from the application of the wider range of information services now available.”

A proven solution fully compatible with the new Care Records Service (CRS)

He continued: “Our system is designed to be highly automated to minimise user intervention. Where manual interventions are required, for example physically merging patient casenotes, these processes are well defined and kept to a minimum. The system will become even more automated with the introduction of the Patient Demographic Service (PDS). Standard reports are produced to assist users in identifying data discrepancies and duplications across disparate systems and has provided support to the trust in their longer-term strategic goals in the areas of quality assurance and information governance. We have deliberately set out to implement a solution that will be fully compatible with the emerging Care Records Service”

CareXML offers fully comprehensive solutions supporting NHS healthcare practice, through powerful data warehouse and reporting capabilities. Stalis’ development of Source System Adaptors enable the extraction of valuable data from any of the trusts’ existing disparate systems.

The CareXML capability proven at Sheffield Children’s NHS Trust offers the potential to make this the solution of choice for many trusts throughout the NHS.

Stalis has developed a network of NHS accredited partners to enable its systems to be implemented either as a robust stand-alone solution or as on or off-site fully managed services.

The future

Russell Banks said: “Stalis are continuously developing their CareXML products and services and we will be taking full advantage of this. The creation of a single integrated patient record is pivotal to the quality of the information services offered by my department as will be the case in the development of the CRS. We continue to work with Stalis to give us full access to operational and clinical data that would otherwise remain inaccessible to the trust.

Stalis – The Healthcare Information Domain Experts

Stalis offers over 21 years experience in delivering high quality and value for money solutions, exclusively in the healthcare industry, with a wide range of clients both within the public and private sectors. The company has built a reputation for excellence in understanding health related data and its management.

Our goal is to help healthcare organisations acquire robust, timely and accurate information in support of their performance challenges. We do this through a combination of highly skilled professional services, product development and integration services built around legacy and new applications.

CareXML is a suite of applications, methodologies and specialised services to assist healthcare providers extract, manage and benefit from the information they collect as a by-product of their clinical and administrative operational systems.

For more information please contact:

Stalis Ltd
The Spendlove Centre
Charlbury, Oxford
OX7 3PQ

Tel: 01608 813901
http://www.stalis.com