Liverpool rolls out clinical portal

Liverpool's Liver building

Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust is planning to have all outpatient clinicians using its new clinical portal by the end of November.

The trust is rolling out CSC’s clinical portal product after running a proof of concept project in 2010.

The CSC clinical portal is an interoperability product that provides a single view of data from different systems.

Director of IM&T, James Norman, who was last month voted EHI’s Healthcare IT Champion of the Year, told EHI they had begun testing in a live environment, with 12 clinicians currently using the system across selected outpatient specialties.

“It is going really well and we are really pleased with it. We are getting some fantastic feedback from clinicians.

“The best thing about it is we keep getting new suggestions of making it work, so it is fantastic that we are getting that feedback.”

The portal is based on Carefx’s Fusionfx interoperability platform and is currently drawing information from the trust’s core clinical systems, such as the iPM patient administration system and Sunquest ICE electronic results reporting and requesting.

The first phase of the project involved building integration with the core clinical systems to ensure data flow was available. Work then began on building the user interface and further developing the core system integration.

Clinicians across selected specialities are now testing the system. That testing would be extended to include all specialities and outpatient clinicians by the end of November.

Norman said the remaining clinical systems would be integrated into the portal over the next few months, with an aim of having them all feeding into the portal by the end of March.

“What we wanted to do is not wait until everything was available before people started using the system.”

Introducing the portal into the inpatient departments would begin in January, and was expected to be completed by the end of the financial year.

Norman said there had not been any problem getting clinicians to use the system

“The reality is that every clinician that has used it to date has needed no more than ten minutes because it is so simple. As long you’re able to use a computer and navigate around a webpage normally, it is that simple.”

The roll out of the clinical portal has formed the foundation of the trust’s 2011-2014 IM&T strategy, which states: “the current CareFX portal roll-out is the key first stage in achieving a trust-wide electronic patient record.”