Basingstoke rolls out IBM portal

Basingstoke and North Hampshire NHS Foundation Trust is rolling out a clinical portal based on IBM’s Websphere platform.

The portal will allow users to view historical patient information, access the trust’s JAC e-prescribing system, place requests for pathology and radiology through its Sunquest ICE system, and create correspondence for GPs.

IBM has been working with the trust on the portal and on getting its systems ready for go-live. This has included upgrading the trust's core network, virtualising its servers in a move from 120 non-IBM to 10 IBM servers, and deploying a wireless network.

Mary Edwards, chief executive of the trust, told E-Health Insider: “Our foundation trust has completed a significant IT investment programme over the past 18 months and established a number of new systems with associated changed work processes."

Sarah Harland, chief information officer, added: “The portal provides essential information required for clinical decision support into one consolidated view. [It also] completes the foundation trust’s delivery of the ‘clinical 5’."

Basingstoke and North Hampshire plans to add more functionality to the portal, including the introduction of business intelligence, enabling wider clinical documentation sharing, and establishing clinical pathway management.

The trust was understood to be one of four (now three) ‘greenfield’ sites in the South of England there were to deploy Cerner Millennium from local service provider BT, as part of its £546m contract to provide Cerner and RiO to sites across the region.

The trust declined to comment whether Cerner is part of its longer term strategy. Such an investment in its infrastructure and the portal would appear to make this unlikely.

However, it may merge with the nearby Winchester and Eastleigh Healthcare NHS Trust, which has been struggling to reach foundation status, ahead of the government's deadline for all trusts to be or be part of foundation trusts by 2013. Winchester is a well-known Cerner Millennium site.

Robert Tickell, IBM's business leader for healthcare and life sciences, told EHI: “It’s fair to say that the national programme has not been a resounding success, so this is a large scale roll out to bring a number of disparate systems together.

“This is a great strategy for those trusts that don’t want to do a rip and replace and don’t have monumental amounts of money to spend. The clinical buy in has been great at the trust and the deployment is on time and on budget.”