St. Mary’s NHS Trust

ReStart rings the CfH integration bell for St. Mary’s NHS Trust in london

A fully CfH-compliant Sun ICAN integration interface environment has been successfully implemented by ReStart Consulting for London-based St. Mary’s NHS Trust.

The project is the latest in a series of similar ICAN integration interface programmes being conducted for NHS trusts and strategic health authorities by Restart Consulting.

St. Mary’s NHS Trust Paddington comprises St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington and the Western Eye Hospital in Marylebone. The Trust provides general hospital services and specialist services in paediatrics, obstetrics, infection and immunity, ophthalmology, robotic surgery and cardiology.

As part of Imperial College, St Mary’s Paddington is a teaching hospital for academic research and medical education. It has been the home to two Nobel Prize winners, including Sir Alexander Fleming for his discovery of penicillin in 1928.It was awarded three stars by the Healthcare Commission, in 2005, for the fourth year running - the highest performance and quality rating for the NHS.

Recent performance highlights include some of the shortest waits for surgery, accident and emergency care, best survival rates after surgery and a forty per cent reduction in MRSA rates in the past three years. Last year, the Trust handled 106,000 A&E patients, an increase of over 10,000 patients over the previous 12 months, and over 270,000 outpatient and 46,000 inpatient attendances.

The Trust’s maternity services achieved level 3 status in the Clinical Negligence Scheme for Trusts (CNST) one of the few London maternity units to achieve this level. It has also signed up to the National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS) and regularly submits data to the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) for all patient safety incidents reported.

Disparate applications

“We had a very disparate set of clinical and management IT applications that just didn’t fit together very well.” Says Phil Jones, the Trust’s IT Director. “No doubt they’d been installed historically for the best of reasons, but changing technologies and the drive to bring systems together meant that a robust integration engine was essential”.

“For example, we had Ascribe for A&E, Ciconia for maternity, Isoft for pathology, and so on. We had looked around for a likely integration engine solution – checked out what other trusts were doing, what software they were using and how they were implementing it”. The Trust then decided on the Sun eGATE solution.

“We’d considered handling implementation ourselves, but timescales were tight and while we probably had the internal technical knowledge, it seemed more practical and sensible to get experts in. This represented a lower risk – and enabled our own IT resources to carry on with existing IT programmes to which we were committed without undue interruption,” says Jones.

“We wanted to be involved in the work and were looking for a partnership relationship which would facilitate a skills transfer for the new technologies involved. We were also conscious of the fact that actually managing the project was as important as choosing the right technical solution”.

“We did have some internal integration resource. But with competing IT demands, we really did not have the expertise and decided we were unable to hire our own resource specialist in that area. We had to recover the situation, and appointed a new integrator – ReStart Consulting”

Chosen for expertise

“They were chosen because of their expertise and what we perceived as their project management abilities. “They were conducting similar programmes for other trusts, as well as strategic health authorities and so had experience at several levels of organisations. They also had excellent eGATE skill, which was not surprising, as all the ReStart Consulting technical consultants and managers were former SeeBeyond personnel,” says Jones.