Frimley Park looks to Harris portal

Frimley Park Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is to use a clinical portal built on the Carefx interoperability platform to support its vision of paperless and mobile clinical working.

Harris Corporation, which bought Carefx in February last year, announced the win this week. It also issued a statement to say that it had “fully integrated” Carefx into its healthcare solutions business.

The initial phase of the portal deployment at Frimley Park will involve the integration of six, core clinical systems.

These include patient demographics, information from A&E, outpatient waiting lists from the patient administration system, real-time admission discharge and transfer, results reporting from radiology and pathology, and images from the picture archiving and communications system.

Clinicians will be able to access all this information using single sign-on. Dr Mark Lloyd, Royal College of Physicians tutor at the trust and one of five clinical leads for the portal project, said other systems, including GP systems, would be included.

“Looking to the future, the ability for healthcare professionals at the coal face to filter and sort patients and link with GP systems through a clinical portal is critical in transforming end-to-end patient care,” he said.

The trust has a three year strategy in place to deploy ‘best of breed’ systems to create a trust-wide, fully integrated electronic patient record.

Jim Trafficant, president of Harris Healthcare Solutions, said the combination of Harris’ strengths in information exchange, image management and infrastructure with Carefx’s interoperability platform, portals, workflow management and analytics expertise would benefit healthcare.

"Harris solutions leverage existing technology infrastructure and deliver clinical integration and analytics across disparate data sources, enhancing clinician adoption and delivering significant savings over wholesale system replacement," he said.

Harris is based in Melbourne, Florida, has 17,000 employees, and works in 150 countries.

Other prominent customers using its products in the NHS include Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust, West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust, and Derby Hospitals NHS Trust.