SDH132 — Provision of an Information Exchange and Clinical Viewer solution.

Descriptions

In support of the Trust's strategic objectives and the national NHS England IT strategic objectives, South Devon Healthcare NHS Trust sought to procure and deploy a Health Information Exchange. The Information Exchange will be used to support the Trust's interactions with organisations in the local health economy, between systems inside the Trust and with national systems.The Trust's IT strategy focuses on using multiple heterogeneous systems procured according to a ‘best of breed’ approach as and when required. The need for information sharing between clinical systems means that the Trust requires an Information Exchange, based on multiple open interoperability standards.SDHCT provides a comprehensive range of acute healthcare services to a resident population of 280 000 and a service to an additional 100 000 holidaymakers who visit the region each year. The Trust operates Torbay Hospital, a medium-sized district general hospital on the outskirts of Torquay and a HIS (Health Informatics Service) for the South Devon Health Community. Patient information from the Acute Hospital Trust, and from GP systems and from the Community are within the scope of these requirements, as is access by clinical and non-clinical staff in all three areas of the same patient information. The viewer must support authorised access only and enable local configuration based on clinician role and facility/organisation.Phasing and usability need to allow for the following:The Trust plans to enable access in the first instance to five or six key systems, and over the next 3 years to add all key clinical systems to this environment.This access will enable viewing of historical and on-going transactions processed by the Trust's information exchange processor, and seamless secure access into the systems themselves. This type of access will take the user with the requisite access approvals directly into the patient context being reviewed.Phase 1 access should include laboratory results, radiology, operations notes and electronic document storage, in addition to alerts and demographic information.Access will be required both from PCs and laptops within the hospital environment, and from hand-held devices throughout the Community in hospitals, clinics and patients' homes.Easily readable screen layouts, ease of use and speed of retrieval are vital.About 1 000 users are likely to require access to the system 24/7 but this may expand throughout the contract to allow more users from different organisations to access the solution.In line with the Trust's IT strategy the goal of the information exchange is not to simply exchange information, but to allow the Trust to develop solutions to problems within the local health economy. It is critical, therefore, that the platform should support the following capabilities:Extendable, both technically and commercially.Supporting local and custom business processesNotify people and systems upon key events, in real timeBusiness intelligence analysis over the population set covered by the Information Exchange.Additional requirements for the system design include:The chosen solution or solutions must be scalable or otherwise adaptable to meet the needs of a possible future enlarged Trust that may arise as a result of any local NHS reorganisation.The solution must be flexible in response to any future physical development of the Trust's estate which may impact the size or geographical spread of the Trust's premises.The solution must be capable of being hosted at the Trust's data centre.Finally, the Trust is seeking a well proven, established and coherent platform for their strategic Health-information Exchange. Specifically, as the Trust will run and manage the platform, the Trust do not wish to assume the risk of putting together a platform involving many suppliers unless that specific combination can be demonstrated by way of definitive comparable reference sites and the consortium are prepared to form a single legal entity prior to entering into the contract.The contract on offer is for the supply, installation and support of the system with an initial 10 year term with possible extension up to 20+ years in duration.