Sheffield Children’s NHS Trust completes NPfIT data cleansing on time and on budget

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”