Stalis, the UK Healthcare information and data management specialists announced that it is delighted to have been appointed to the ASCC Framework agreement to provide a wide range of Information products and services to the NHS.

The new Additional Supply Capability and Capacity (ASCC) framework contracts are for a four year duration. They will allow NHS organisations and other NHS-funded establishments such as Independent Treatment Centres a faster and easier route to procure IT systems and services from suppliers who have demonstrated experience in the health sector.  ASCC can be used to support both National Programme for IT (NPfIT) related work and wider IT related projects.

Stalis’s Managing Director, Christine Whitehouse, said “This welcomed CfH initiative has recognised the part that committed dedicated and experienced SME’s have to play in the delivery of high quality healthcare information solutions to the NHS. Stalis has supported the NHS with PAS, Data Migration, Management reporting, Maternity, A&E, Clinical departmental and Decision support systems for over 20 years, this new initiative builds on our proven capability to innovate, deliver and support robust solutions in the highly demanding healthcare arena”.

Stalis and Fujitsu jointly exhibited CareXML Business Activity Manager during the Microsoft NHS Roadshows in Somerset and London. Stalis CareXML products and services were recently chosen by Fujitsu as their standard Local Data Warehouse offering for all Trusts in the Southern Cluster.

For further information contact John Wiltshire, Sales & Marketing Director, Stalis Ltd, The Spendlove Centre, Charlbury, OXON OX4 3PQ  or john.w@stalis.com

To meet the growing demand from Trusts facing the trauma of converting from existing Patient Administration Systems to the Care Record Service, Stalis has extended its highly successful CareXML data management software and services portfolio to include a Local Data Warehouse (LDW) for business continuity and long term management reporting.

In moving to the CRS Trusts have been faced with the  prospect of buying three or even four different solutions to meet all their conversion needs for data  extraction, cleansing and transformation, a historic patient data repository for non transferred patient data and a local data warehouse to support all the critical reporting requirements. This situation has been exacerbated with the introduction of 18WW and the recognition that some of the new systems cannot provide all the CDS data required. Trusts have found with the move to CRS that their business continuity is at risk

The solution

The Stalis CareXML strategy has long been based on the premise that for timely and accurate reporting Trusts must have a robust system that extracts and produces quality data.  The CareXML portfolio already combines an end-to-end solution for data extraction, cleansing, consolidation, migration and transformation coupled with a repository for historic patient data that can be ‘kept alive’ after the move to CRS. Now, with the general release of the LDW Trusts can be assured all their reporting requirements can be met from one fully integrated and proven solution.

Speaking of this development Christine Whitehouse, Stalis Managing Director commented “Stalis has invested over three years of R&D in bringing this new solution to fruition. We now have a single modular solution that allows Trusts to make one investment as part of their move to CRS such that the resources used in migration benefit the Trust across their current and future reporting needs”

Technical Director Peter Gamston added “Our goal was to provide Trusts with a single data management and reporting architecture and thus ensure we offered Trusts both unrivalled value for money as well as the security of business continuity. Our latest addition to the CareXML portfolio allows Trust Information departments to provide a single source solution to all the users, including full dashboard capabilities for Key Performance Indicators to support senior management and clinicians. Our vision is to extend the CareXML LDW so that Trusts can at last undertake accurate and timely patient based costing as the capabilities of CRS are rolled out.

Recently, Fujitsu Business Services announced their choice of the Stalis CareXML LDW as part of the Fujitsu Business Continuity LDW solution for all Trusts in the Southern Cluster. Christine Whitehouse said “this partnership is a milestone in the development of Stalis and CareXML as well as recognition of the excellent Healthcare information solutions that it offers.

On Sunday 10th June the first patient was admitted to Moorfields Eye Hospital’s new CareXML® based Electronic Patient Record system (EPR) provided by Stalis. The Stalis EPR, powered by Silverlink PCS, one of the UK’s most widely used Patient Administration Systems , provides the Trust with a fully NPfIT compliant solution for Choose & Book and 18 week pathways and replaces a 1980s bespoke system. The Stalis EPR is built around the CareXML® Patient Data Repository.

The actual go live, achieved in ten months, required no more than 36 hours operational downtime for the final migration and testing processes to be completed and the objective of migrating the majority of appointment bookings (over 5000) to the new system was achieved despite major changes in clinic structures and organisation on the new system.

Today, Sheffield Children’s Hospital NHS Trust announced the successful completion of the first three phases (a major milestone) in their project to ‘clean’ patient data stored in multiple information systems preparatory to migrating to new NPfIT systems and linking to the National Spine record.

Russell Banks, IM&T Manager for the Trust, explained, “like many other NHS hospitals, Sheffield Children’s has suffered from the situation that it has patient demographic and episode related data stored across a number of current systems which made it difficult to get a consistent patient profile. The situation was made worse by the fact that the Trust’s Child Health system was a ‘closed’ technology and operating separately from the patient administration system (PAS)”

The Trust recognised that there were also problems commonly associated with disparate systems such as duplication of patients, difficulties in matching patients and other inconsistencies in the data. “ We needed to clean up this data and assign accurate NHS numbers to the patient records before we moved forward with the NPfIT” said Russell Banks

Working closely with Stalis in this project, the Trust recognised that they could leverage the combination of Stalis’s in depth understanding and knowledge of NHS data structures and current systems in combination with the CareXML methodology, dedicated software tools and repository to validate, cleanse and transform the data to create a single enterprise wide patient record that will be used to feed the smaller departmental systems. All three stages of the project were achieved as planned: -

• Firstly, Stalis extracted the ‘closed’ data from the two systems into new open databases
• This open data was then re-formatted into a common standard and sub-sets of all patient records (including those with NHS numbers) sent to the National Tracing Service to have their numbers checked or assigned
• Once the traced records were returned the clean records (those with no duplications and a unique NHS number were stored within Stalis’s CareXML. Those records that ‘failed’ were then handed back to the Trust for investigation and, after amendment, re-submission.

Of the total 628,706 records processed, 356,220 (57%) were ‘clean’. Commenting on this Russell Banks said “ At first we were somewhat surprised that the figure for clean records was only about 60%. However, on reflection the process was thorough and exposed the extent to which duplicates and incomplete records can evolve over time when systems are not integrated and where patient data is entered more than once. We now feel the exercise has been extremely beneficial and plan to work with Stalis to ‘clean’ our other systems. It also reinforced the Trust’s decision to take an early action in its commitment to the NPfIT as cleaning integrating and migrating patient data is a big task, needing time and specialist skills. Our results show in a small way the magnitude of the task facing the NHS”

Ali McGuckin, Stalis’s Client Services Director, added “ The results have proved what can be achieved when suppliers and Trusts work as one team in a project, Sheffield Children’s staff and our own have recognised the importance of this project and the co-operation from the Trust was exemplary”