Great Western integrates with Ensemble

Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with InterSystems' Ensemble three months after it began implementing the platform.

The integration engine has allowed the trust to directly link three applications, including its electronic discharge summaries and infection control system, to its MedWay Patient Administration System, supplied by System C.

The applications are linked to the platform via an intermediate patient database and will gradually communicate and feed directly from the PAS.

Alistair Dewar, software development team leader at the Great Western Hospital, told E-Health Insider: “We were using a database associated with the PAS to retrieve patient demographic data and there were several real performance issues and delays with updating the systems."

The trust selected InterSystems Ensemble in March 2009 on the basis that it would replace adhoc interfacing and be bi-directional between the trust, local systems and those provided by its local service provider.

Dewar added: “InterSystems' Ensemble is already the product of choice for the integration of all new applications in the North, Midlands and East and it also had very good recommendations.

"It supports HL7 [the standard allowing different applications to communicate with each other] out of the box and has a good footprint across America and Australia.”

The trust wanted the integration engine live within three months so doctors would not have to be trained twice on the system as a result of their turn around at the beginning of August.

Dewar said: “The benefits to staff include that there is no longer any delay uploading data between the PAS and the discharge summary. Users no longer have to hit refresh to get the latest version of the discharge summary and all the systems are getting data in real-time so what staff see is what they get.”

The development of the required interfaces was carried out by Restart Consulting, an implementation partner of InterSystems Ensemble. As part of its support, Restart ran an integration workshop and will provide ongoing mentoring to IT staff at the trust.

Phil Birchall, head of healthcare business development for InterSystems UK, said. “We are delighted that Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has adopted and used Ensemble so successfully in association with Restart.

"In addition, it is good to know that when they need additional support, it can be supplied by Restart.”

Link: InterSystems Ensemble