The body that provides IT services to many of Plymouth's
GPs and hospitals is using a systems integration tool from
InterSystems to link its existing applications to new systems from
the NHS's National Programme for IT (NPfIT).
The body, Plymouth NHS ICT Shared Services, is replacing its
current integration platform with InterSystems Ensemble to help the
Plymouth healthcare community to integrate its best-of-breed legacy
clinical applications with the datacentre-hosted suite of
applications provided by Connecting for Health, which runs the
NPfIT.
Nick Thomas, director of ICT at Plymouth, said, “This investment
will enable the community to fully embrace the central integrated
solutions provided by the National Programme for IT, while
maintaining and enhancing the benefits to clinicians delivered by
our local best-of-breed applications.”
Plymouth Shared Services supports more than 15,000 users across
a large acute NHS trust, a teaching primary care trust and more
than 50 GP surgeries in the area.
Plymouth Shared Services will use InterSystems’ rapid
integration software, Ensemble, to tie together its existing
best-of-breed applications within its numerous sites.
InterSystems said Ensemble supported popular object-oriented
development environments, including Microsoft .net. This gives a
close fit with tools already in use by the Shared Services team,
protecting the existing investment in development skills.
“InterSystems Ensemble will enable us to work more efficiently
to deliver robust, scalable, maintainable and cost-effective
integration solutions to our stakeholders,” said Andy Blofield,
head of technology at Plymouth 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,” Blofield added.
Plymouth Shared Services said it planned to use InterSystems
Ensemble to populate a new local business data warehouse with data
from the remote national datacentre in real time. Ensemble will
also help the team move towards service oriented architecture
(SOA).
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