Central Manchester upgrade cancer care system

Cancer care staff at the Central Manchester and Manchester Children’s University Hospitals NHS Trust will be able to find all cancer care notes on one system following the trust's upgrade of its IMS Maxims clinicals system.

The trust had been using an older version of the system, which was not interoperable, meaning each cancer specialty had different sets of notes for each patient.

The system should be able to capture all data for any patient who comes to any of the trust's eight hospital sites for cancer treatment.

The upgraded version of Maxims is web-based and connects to existing trust systems using HL7 via an integration engine.

A trust spokesperson told E-Health Insider: “We plan to consolidate all our systems into one. This will be done in a phased implementation over the next few months."

The trust has begun with the colorectal department. "We will upgrade the system in the colorectal department first and evaluate this first before rolling it out to three other cancer specialties,” said the spokesperson.

Once fully implemented, the cancer system will store the core data for every step of the patient journey from preadmission to discharge. "We will use it to support our work in the care pathway and we will be able to configure it to help us meet targets in the long run. Not only will it maximise patient care, but it will offer users significantly improved functionality,” said the spokesperson.

The system also has integrated reporting which will allow the trust to extract data they need to submit to prove they are meeting national targets.

The spokesperson explained: “Compared to the time it used to take us to return statistics from each database to prove we are meeting longer term care pathway measurement targets, we will now be able to extract data for auditing and measurement purposes much quicker, and will be able to identify areas where we are experiencing weaknesses in the treatment of our cancer patients.”

Once fully rolled-out the trust hope to use the system in all cancer wards, helping to ensure the best possible care can be provided for all patients. The trial of the system should help to ensure that it captures detailed information on examination, assessment, investigations, diagnosis, tumour staging, surgical and non-surgical treatment, outcomes and follow up visits.

Janet Proctor, Central Manchester and Manchester Children’s acting director of informatics, said: “We are looking forward to implementing the web-based system and will be evaluating the benefit of extending to further specialties following the successful implementation of the current project.”

Links

IMS Maxims