IMX Interoperability Record – extended in Nottinghamshire Healthcare
Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (the Trust) has confirmed today the purchase of IMX Interoperability Record plus a 3 year services and support contract from UK SME, ReStart Consulting Ltd (ReStart). This announcement follows the successful trial of IMX-IR at the Trust and will extend the use of IMX-IR to a wider range of the Trust’s services and facilities.
The Trust provides a range of integrated healthcare services including mental health services, substance misuse services, intellectual and developmental disability services, secure mental health services, community healthcare and healthcare in prisons.
These services are provided in a variety of settings such as community, inpatient and outpatient settings. The Trust manages two medium secure units and one high secure hospital. The Trust services are provided from more than 100 sites, with more than 9,000 staff and a revenue income of over £400million per year. There are multiple IT systems that are used throughout the Trust in the delivery of care.
Many of the Trust’s patients and service users have both physical and mental health issues and use several services during their care, recovery and maintaining wellbeing.
Andrew Haw, Head of Health Informatics, Nottinghamshire Healthcare advised; “Our Trust started as a mental health services provider and like many NHS organisations has grown through mergers. It now also offers community health provision. This means that it has disparate clinical systems for physical and mental health.”
The use of these various systems caused some problems in that clinicians and pharmacists were having to re-enter material from one system into another which introduces a possibility of error. Clinicians and other support providers had to make decisions without having access to all the relevant documentation available within all the relevant systems, as they were not necessarily visible to them.
It was deemed critically important that the Trust’s patient administration systems were linked so that clinicians and healthcare teams providing services could have access to most of the relevant patient records, such as treatment and care plans.
The Trust wanted a portal solution that would mine and give access to the relevant data for its clinical and healthcare support teams. In 2015, following a tender process, IMX-IR was selected from ReStart. It demonstrated the capability that was needed, at a price that was extremely competitive, and ReStart was deemed to have a good track record in healthcare IT. During 2015/16 a 12-month proof of concept trial took place to trial IMX-IR portal solution in the Trust’s Rapid Response Liaison Psychiatry Teams across Nottinghamshire.
Through the proof of concept phase ReStart clearly demonstrated that IMX-IR could take data from disparate systems, built on different proprietary platforms, and pull it into role specific views. This meant that for the first time clinicians could see all the relevant patient detail they needed, that was particular to their role.
Following this successful proof of concept phase, the Trust has today announced its decision to extend the use of IMX-IR across its wider range of services. IMX-IR will integrate with patient administration systems Rio from Servelec HSC, but also PC MIS from York University and the Medical Interoperability Gateway linking in limited primary care information.
Andrew said, “During the proof of concept phase we saw a decrease in the risk of error as we eliminated the need to repeat enter data. We also saw increases in the quality of patient care as clinical decisions were made following greater access to important patient health histories.”
“Clinicians did not have to waste critical time double entering data. Time was saved in not trying to find information that may or may not have existed and decisions about patients were made with all the relevant facts available. And importantly, in today’s climate, because IMX-IR is built using open source technology the Trust is not committed to expensive licencing of proprietary technology which would have made this project untenable.”
Andrew continued, “Based on the success of the initial phase, we are confident that a wider roll out of IMX-IR will further extend the benefits to the patient, the clinical and healthcare teams, and the Trust.”
IMX-IR will be used by clinical teams, and support services such as pharmacists. It comes with personalised, role base access and consent making the view from the IMX-IR portal a highly personalised and relevant system which is essential to gain clinical trust when introducing any new IT system.
Mike Symers, Managing Director of ReStart said, “The ability of the IMX-IR system to scale up is critical for a large Trust like Nottinghamshire Healthcare. The portal will be available to 500 active users, and up to 6,000 concurrent (but not necessarily active) users.”
The delivery contract for the IMX-IR solution will run for 3 years and includes IT support and maintenance components.
More on Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
Nottinghamshire Healthcare is positive about providing integrated healthcare services, including mental health, learning disability and physical health services. Over 9000 dedicated staff provide these services in a variety of settings, ranging from the community through to acute wards, as well as secure settings. The Trust manages two medium secure units, Arnold Lodge in Leicester and Wathwood Hospital in Rotherham, and the high secure Rampton Hospital near Retford. It also provides healthcare in prisons across the East Midlands and Yorkshire.
Visit the website at www.nottinghamshirehealthcare.nhs.uk
