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Cumbria and Lancashire SHA
Choosing the right integration solution for Cumbria and Lancashire SHA
One of 28 “old” Strategic Health Authorities in the UK and employing around 100 personnel, Cumbria and Lancashire SHA is responsible for health services to over two million people..
It oversees 23 trusts, including 13 Primary Care, five Acute Hospital and two Ambulance Trusts, as well as three Mental Health.
The authority and its trusts have received a plethora of awards for excellence. This year so far they include accolades, for cardiac care, extended services to nursing homes, palliative care – and achievement in a range of projects. These include the Morecambe Bay PCT Seed project and Preston PCT and Chorley and Ribble PCT Get It On campaign.
Recently, it has received £75 million from the Department of Health to invest over three years in a wide range of capital projects, including a new hospital as well as a variety of new units, facilities and services.
A key role of the authority is ensuring that trusts under its auspices employ IT effectively and meet government computing demands - and compliance with the requirements of such initiatives as CfH. A seasoned user of IT, the authority and its trusts have an IT infrastructure that is fairly typical of its peers.
This comprised historically installed mixed hardware, mostly PC server-based, and a variety of legacy application software systems. These range from patient administration to, for example, radiology, biology, endoscopy, cardiology as well as all the other traditional practice and administrative areas.
Project impetus
“The impetus for the project was the need to comply with the application interfacing requirements of the NPfIT programme,” says Cumbria and Lancashire Assistant Chief Information Officer, Clinical Services, Mike McKenna.
“We wanted advice on setting up and configuring an interfacing environment, development of initial interfaces for four acute NHS trusts for which we are responsible, implementation, training and general hand-holding (Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has a longer term pre-NPfIT contract with an existing supplier).
“We also needed strong and authoritative project management resources so that we would actually get a solution that would work first time – and provide a stable platform for future developments that we could undertake ourselves”.
“The two issues facing us were which interface technologies would best enable us to meet the NPfIT-mandated integration functionality, and how to implement them?
A significant factor was timescale and we didn’t want to incur learning curve delays”. “We reckoned we had sufficient in-house ability, but on balancing our IT skill strengths and weaknesses, we decided that it would be better, safer and quicker to go for an external, professional one-stop integration solution provider”.
“An added benefit of using an external resource would be that a partnership arrangement with such a solution provider would broaden our own skillsets and enable us to more authoritatively handle further, continuing developments and enhancements,” says McKenna.
Reference solutions
“We pre-specified the actual interface engine. While a variety was available - each with their own particular advantages and drawbacks - we decided on Sun’s SeeBeyond ICAN suite. We’d already seen it working with reference solution applications. For example, with iSoft’s Clinical Manager and Patient Manager systems and were aware of its functionality”.
SeeBeyond had been chosen by BT to provide the core software for the transactional messaging service for ‘data spine’, as part of their National Application Service Provider (NASP) contract to deliver the central NHS Care Record Service component of NPfIT. BT is using the ICAN (Integrated Composite Application Network) suite to design, deliver and manage the national patient record database and transactional messaging service, at the centre of NHS CRS.
As the core software for the transactional messaging service initiative, SeeBeyond’s eGate Integrator and eInsight Business Process Manager will serve as the Web services and J2EE-based integration platform for business process management. Delivery of the personal demographics service module of NHS CRS is being facilitated by SeeBeyond’s eView Global Identifier. This will act as the basis of the NHS CRS to record and cross-index patient and care information electronically, eliminating duplication of patient files and improving information sharing.
Logical choice
“For these reasons it was a fairly logical choice,” says McKenna, “which then left us with deciding who was going to take responsibility for actually managing the project from end to end and implementing the solution, as well as providing any necessary consultancy, training and hand-holding”.
“Essentially, SeeBeyond’s ICAN was proven technology. It was available, flexible, with an attractive, familiar GUI and could handle very large message volumes reliably. We knew of banking applications where ICAN was supporting literally millions of messages a day; a reassuring statistic even though our own message volumes are considerably lower”.
“For example, the Morecambe Bay trust is currently running at around 20,000 a day, although that figure will rise very significantly as the NPfIT Connecting for Health programme really gets underway”.
SeeBeyond’s ICAN suite is the most usable, scalable and open platform for developing, executing and managing end-to-end integrated business processes as composite applications.
The suite is the next generation of open integration bringing A2A, B2B, and BPM together with Web services, SOA, J2EE Application Servers, ETL, BAM, Data Quality Management, Composite View Generation, Indexing, Workflow and Portals.
Sun SeeBeyond is recognised as a major player in the international integration arena. For example, top analysts Butler Group – www.butlergroup.com – named it as “the leading integration software vendor”. A recent Butler Report review of the ICAN 5.5 suite described it as a product “that broke new ground” in the application integration landscape”. “As regards an integration solution provider, we selected ReStart Consulting on their basis of their experience in handling IT projects in the NHS sector” says McKenna.
“Also, their familiarity with and expertise in SeeBeyond technologies, and demonstrable ability to handle the implementation and manage it to best practice project management and methodology standards. For example, Prince2”. “We wanted a sure, safe hand at the tiller, particularly as the project also involved a hardware move – new for some organisations – into the Unix world.” says McKenna.
“The bottom line benefit is that we now have the building blocks in place for when the NPfIT programme really gets underway. This has been accomplished smoothly and authoritatively in partnership with ReStart in a seamless project running from specification to implementation and live running”.
Standard set of applications
“For the trusts, it means a move to a standard set of applications and a shared environment that is able to tie in historical legacy systems. Morecambe Bay is now live and Fylde Coast are live with connection from their local PAS system to a theatre system. East Lancashire has completed most of it’s interface development work for an upcoming PAS replacement and the next to be up and running will be North Cumbria”.
“Users will be able to deploy reference solution applications more easily, keep to timescales more scrupulously, retain and continue getting value from existing departmental systems – with a single, co-ordinated approach across all communities”.
“We will also have a much improved ability to re-se development work, substantially adding value to development investment. For example, virtually any interface written for a particular system can be used by all trusts, and mutual support is significantly enhanced. As well as sharpening our IT infrastructure, the project will result in substantial software cost savings”.
