Innovative database software delivers power to the patient
Ireland’s National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) has launched a
national online database that runs on innovative software from
Dublin-based, IMS MAXIMS.
The NTPF’s Patient Treatment Register (PTR), located at
www.ptr.ie, provides public access to
waiting numbers and times for thousands of procedures performed in major
hospitals throughout Ireland.
IMS MAXIMS has installed a software system for database extraction,
validation and data warehouse compilation so that users can access
accurate and up-to-date information derived from the individual hospitals’
computer systems.
The PTR system receives waitinglist data from the disparate patient
administration systems (PAS) and builds it into an information source that
can display detail right down to procedural level. As a result, members of
the public are able to view aggregated, easy-to-understand data on the top
20 procedures, which account for 50% of waiting lists. GPs, meanwhile,
will have access to even more detailed waiting time information for all
available specialities and procedures across all hospitals.
Brian Ennis, chief executive of IMS MAXIMS, says: "Providing this level
of procedural detail required the full mapping, of in excess if 10,000
procedural codes, into the data warehouse. One of the biggest challenges
was negotiating consistent guidelines for data recording across all
hospitals and gaining the agreement to build extra fields into their basic
datasets to give the level of detail in the extract file, needed by the NTPF."
According to Ireland’s Tånaiste and Minister for Health and Children,
Mary Harney, TD: "The Patient Treatment Register is a new way of putting
patients first in the way we provide elective treatments in our hospitals.
People will have better information and choice about their treatment."
The launch constitutes ‘phase one’ of the project, with the mapping of
the remaining Irish hospitals still to come.
24 October 2005
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