Systems integration

Technology in action: Plymouth ICT Shared Services

New integration platform for Plymouth trust

July 2007

In a nutshell
Organisation: Plymouth NHS ICT Shared Services.
Problem: Large amounts of time spent maintaining and tailoring IT systems and training people to use them.
Solution: Ensemble.
Supplier: InterSystems.
Benefits: The system is easy to use and to customise, and is saving staff time. It is also highly scalable and helps streamline the development and management of IT architecture.

Plymouth ICT Shared Services has replaced its current integration platform with new rapid integration software — InterSystems Ensemble. This will enable the Plymouth healthcare community to integrate its legacy clinical applications with the data-centre-hosted suite of applications provided by Connecting for Health.

“This investment will enable the community to fully embrace the central integrated solutions provided by the National Programme for IT”, said Nick Thomas, Director of ICT at the Trust, “while maintaining and enhancing the benefits to clinicians delivered by our local best-of-breed applications.”

The Plymouth ICT Shared Services team supports over 15,000 users across one large acute trust, one teaching primary care Trust and over 50 GP surgeries in the area. These users provide healthcare to the 500,000-plus people in Plymouth and the surrounding area. The Trust will use InterSystems’ rapid integration software, Ensemble, to ‘tie together’ existing applications within its numerous sites. Ensemble is easy to use and simple to customise — which means that less time will be spent on maintenance, training and tailoring IT systems.

As an additional benefit, the software supports popular object-oriented development environments, including Microsoft.NET. This means that Ensemble closely fits the tools already in use by the Shared Services team, which will enable it to maximise its existing investment in development skills by implementing a trust-wide solution.

“InterSystems Ensemble will enable us to work more efficiently to deliver robust, scaleable, maintainable and cost-effective integration solutions to our stakeholders”, said Andy Blofield, Head of Technology at Plymouth ICT Shared Services. “In addition to providing an improved service, by streamlining the development and management processes of our integration architecture, we will have an IT system that’s flexible and scalable enough to support the community in the long-term, while still allowing us to use the most appropriate systems for our needs.”

“The Plymouth team already had a relationship with InterSystems through our Caché post-relational database, which has been used in the Trust’s pathology systems for a number of years. We are delighted that we can share with the Trust the benefits of our experience and proven track-record in supporting industry-leading healthcare solutions, including many of the largest electronic health record systems worldwide.”

In the future, Plymouth ICT Shared Services is planning to use Ensemble to populate a new local business datawarehouse remotely and in real time, from the National Data Centre. Ensemble will also help the team facilitate its vision of a move towards service-oriented architecture (see jargon buster, below). The flexibility and scalability of Ensemble will enable the community to communicate and integrate with the Connecting for Health programme as the national services are delivered.

Jargon buster

Microsoft.NET

An umbrella term that applies to a wide collection of products and technologies from Microsoft. Most have in common a dependence on the Microsoft.NET Framework, a component of the Windows operating system.

NICTIZ

The Dutch National Institute for ICT in Healthcare. Helps bridge the gap between the often-fragmented Dutch initiatives in healthcare IT by bringing together all the parties involved.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA)

An architecture that relies on service orientation as its fundamental design principle. Resources on a network in an SOA environment are made available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation.

 
 

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