Royal Wolverhampton NHS merges IT systems

The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust has joined up its records to create a single patient administration system (PAS) for use in both acute and community services.

In 2011, the trust took over community services from the then Wolverhampton City Primary Care Trust, which led to the two areas using different systems – the acute services running the Silverlink PAS, with community using iPM.

However, as the iPM system contract was due to come to an end in July 2016, the trust decided to migrate the records.

Working with Stalis, using the company’s CareXML platform, the trust matched and merged more than 109,000 master patient index records. It also transferred referrals and other clinical data across, as well as creating 20,000 new records and 5,000 new registrations for patients not already on the PAS.

Nick Bruce, associate director of ICT at the trust, said it’s important to make sure that patient records and information “is accurate and up-to-date to support hospital processes such as sending appointment letters to patients or notifying their GPs on progress with their care”.

Looking to the future, the trust is planning to use its clinical web portal to consolidate and standardise practices across the organisation.

The trust used the government’s G-Cloud procurement framework to find and select Stalis’s services. G-Cloud recently came under criticism as a survey found that a quarter of councils’ procurement policies do not support the use of it.

While central government departments are mandated to take a cloud-first approach to IT procurement, and expected to justify their use of on-premise technologies, no such mandate exists at local government or NHS level.