PAS for Calderdale and Huddersfield
Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust has implemented a
single patient administration system (PAS) across all areas, with the
system successfully live in just 16 weeks.
The Trust, which serves a patient population of 420,000 and employs
over 5,000 staff, had previously been operating with different PAS
systems at its various sites (the Calderdale Royal Hospital in Halifax,
the Huddersfield Royal Infirmary and St Luke’s Hospital in
Huddersfield). Working with different PASs resulted in duplicate patient
records, repeated data entry and a burden for staff that needed to work
at more than one site. Additionally, with its newly won ‘foundation
hospital’ status, the Trust needed to ensure that new government
reporting commitments could be met regularly and on time.
The Trust management team saw that the con-tinued use of disparate
systems would make it difficult to meet these reporting commitments. As
a consequence, the Trust worked with the strategic health authority,
Connecting for Health (CfH) and its local service provider to determine
that the implementation of a single unified PAS could deliver
significant benefits to the organisation, until CfH products are
available to support it.
The Calderdale Royal was already running a successful PAS based on
database technology from InterSystems. The Trust was satisfied, however,
that the new system could be extended to the other two sites, and the
decision was therefore taken to standardise on InterSystems’ Cache
database.
Originally the PAS running at the Halifax site was implemented on a
UNIX server system. As part of the multi-site implementation, the use of
Cache has enabled the application to be quickly transferred to a
high-availability MS Windows server environment. The Trust can now run
its total PAS workload on an inexpensive modern server platform, cutting
the total cost of ownership and reducing the support burden for the
Trust’s IT staff.
Source: bjhc&im April 2007
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