21 October 2009
NHS Calderdale: All Systems Go on Deploying SystmOne
Local health services in NHS Calderdale serve 198,500 people and employ over 600 staff. SystmOne is currently live in GP, Out of Hours, Darzi Centre, Child Health and Community services. Over one-third of the 29 GP practices in the PCT are live or in deployment, the rest are expected to follow shortly.
Here, Janice Richardson, IT Lead Nurse, and Moira Hall, Assistant Director of IM&T, tell us about NHS Calderdale's SystmOne journey:
"Early in 2008, NHS Calderdale embarked on an ambitious programme to implement SystmOne in a number of health care settings including Child Health, Community, Urgent Care and in GP practices who chose to migrate from their existing systems. At the same time, Calderdale and Huddersfield Foundation Trust made a decision to implement SystmOne for Therapy services. Our vision for the local health community is to implement common clinical information systems which enable health care professionals to have the right information about the patient at the right time and in the right place.
"Community Services commenced their SystmOne roll-out in July 2008; completed services now include Community Matrons, District Nursing,Rapid Response Service, School Nursing and Health Visiting. The Substance Misuse Service is currently undergoing the Business Change process and system functionality is being developed to support their workflow. The next phases will coverHealth Improvement Services and the specialist services - the Tuberculosis Service, the Continence Service and the Falls Team. Completion is scheduled for December 2009.
"The District Nurses started using SystmOne at the end of last year, but it quickly became apparent that work needed to be done to enable the unit to utilise the full clinical functionality available in SystmOne. Using feedback from the clinicians and by working with a group of people interested in helping improve workflow, a new holistic assessment template has been built to reflect the way the unit works and to allow the nurses the autonomy to make clinical decisions, within a standardised template.
"This template design has also proved useful for the Rapid Response Team and gives the individual the opportunity to pull in specialist tools such as M.U.S.T. (Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool) and the Bristol Stool Chart as necessary.
"Introducing SystmOne as a clinical information system has provided some early benefits realisation. In terms of improved clinical practice, the nurse is now aware of the care currently being provided and joint case management is facilitated.
"Through the introduction of SystmOne, working processes have been reviewed and revised, resulting in standardised documentation, which can produce robust, meaningful reporting information.
"An essential part of the system configuration work was the determination that all templates built within the community modules would not conflict with any other coding structures used by partner agencies. This assurance was obtained by careful use of non-diagnostic Read Codes and restricted access to the Read Code browser.
"Although we now have the majority of services using SystmOne, it is recognised that this is only the first step in a long journey. Moving forward, we intend to build on the functionality currently in the system, continually monitor the data quality and work with the various disciplines to help them understand how technology can improve the clinical care they deliver."
