Bury and Rochdale Healthcare NHS Trusts hope to radically improve
patient care with the implementation of a £2.9m patient
administration system.
Scheduled to go live in April next year, the system will link up
with those of the pathology, radiology, nursing, maternity and
accident and emergency departments.
The system is part of an 11-year deal with IT healthcare specialist
McKesson.
The company will also install applications for ordering tests,
reporting results and issuing electronic prescriptions. These will
be integrated with existing systems to give the trusts a full
electronic patient record system.
Paul Street, IT project manager for both Bury and Rochdale
Healthcare NHS trusts, said, "We are looking to provide an improved
service and ensure that we can make all administrative and clinical
data available to consultants."
The deal also includes electronic booking, allowing GPs to make
patient appointments online.
Mike Eades, Rochdale NHS Trust's IM&T manager, said, "Giving
clinicians modern systems and easy access to complete patient and
medical information will improve patient care."
Rules-based clinical applications will help cut costs by preventing
unnecessary repetition of tests, he said.
The applications will run on a range of new IBM hardware at
Rochdale NHS Trust, including four xSeries application servers and
an Intel-based xSeries database machine.
McKesson will run a managed service across both sites for 10 years
from April next year. The trusts have struck service level
agreements with the company covering availability, response times
and system fix times.
McKesson is still involved in negotiations with NHS Shared Services
for a massive £300m 10-year deal to update the health service's
human resources and payroll systems. In June, a consortium headed
by McKesson was named as the preferred supplier for the system,
called Oracle HRMS.