Great Ormond Street Hospital aims to save a total of
more than 30 hours a day of clinicians' time by rolling out
technology to simplify the way doctors access clinical software and
databases.
The system will allow clinicians at the London children's
hospital to retrieve medical data on patients from a wide range of
specialist databases, without having to log on and search each
database individually.
It will also help the hospital reduce the risk of clinical error
and improve the security of confidential medical information.
"If you have four or five applications open at the same time and
you are constantly changing patient, sooner or later you could
leave one turned to the wrong patient. That is one of the issues we
can avoid," said David Bowen, ERP programme manager at the
hospital.
Great Ormond Street took the decision to integrate a diverse
range of specialist applications from different suppliers in 2002,
but the technology capable of doing so has only recently become
available.
It plans to trial a Sentillion single sign-on and content
management system in its nephro-urology department between now and
Christmas, before rolling it out to 2,000 clinical staff over the
course of next year.
The hospital will deliver the system via Citrix thin clients to
reduce the processing load on older PCs used in the department.
"We do not have a large IT department, and we wanted something
that was easy to roll out. The Citrix approach seemed the best way
to go about it. It is most in tune with our strategy direction -
divorcing user sessions from physical machines," said Bowen.
The system will initially allow clinical staff to log on with a
single password, rather than the five or more they are currently
expected to remember. But the hospital plans in time to replace
passwords entirely with smartcards, which are due to be rolled out
under the NHS National Programme for IT to control access to
patient administration systems.
"At the moment, people have to remember a password. That is a
chink in your armour. People can share them with colleagues, give
them away or write them down. If you have a smartcard, you have
much better security," said Bowen.
Once installed, the software will make it easier for the
hospital to deploy and integrate a wider range of software from
specialist suppliers.
"Eventually, I think this kind of technology will allow an
opening up of the healthcare systems market. It will be easier to
integrate non-healthcare specific systems into our overall
environment," said Bowen. "It does in a lot of ways free you from
having to use systems that have patient focus built in from the
bottom up."
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