Northgate Managed Services

Northgate delivered, implemented and managed a Clincial Portal service for an NHS Consortium made up of NHS Lothian, NHS Fife, NHS Borders and NHS Dumfries and Galloway.

Key Drivers

• improve patient care
• reduce medical risk
• increase efficiencies
• share patient data across boards
• reduce/remove complexity of password management
• Maximise the use of existing legacy systems

The clinical portal pulls information from a number of clinical systems including SCI Store, PACs, Emergency Care Summary (ECS), Labs systems and the respective PAS/PMS systems in operation to offer the clinician a single view of the patient with all relevant information.  

Working with Northgate Managed Services, NHS Fife have implemented 3 key solutions to improve the patient experience and efficiencies:

• Single Sign on access to multiple systems for clinicians
• Clincical Portal for access to patient summary information extracted from multiple systems
• Observation and Assessment tool for recording observations electronically and supporting Early Warning Scores and manage early intervention.

Key Benefits:

• Improved access to patient data
• Improved security
• Improved efficiency
• Increased staff productivity
• Reduced costs

NHS Lothian are benefiting from the following solutions:

• Clinical Portal
• Thin Client
• speech recognition
• Unified communications
• Privacy Surveillance
• Document Management

Challenge

Dated internal communication system and dispersed workforce meant the trust needed to improve their ability to share information and communicate more effectively to deliver a more responsive service to patients.

Solution

Northgate delivered SharePoint 2010, a system which enables users to share information online, manage documents, publish reports and aid decision making.

Result

The solution has helped integrate service delivery across the organisation which spans 5 Council areas, improved collaborative working and faster communication both for staff and for patients.

Challenge

NHS Lothian experienced a large backlog in the production of medical documents.  Their aim was to increase the speed by which documents were produced to support clinical and patient demand while also reducing the amount of errors on documents and increasing security of patient information.

Solution

Northgate implemented a speech recognition solution, where the clinician dictates information, this is processed by the speech recognition technology and the documents created.

Result

There was dramatic improvements with turnaround time for discharge summaries being reduced from an average 9 days to an  average 5 days.  An average of 43% efficiency gains across the 4 hospital departments have been achieved.

Challenge

NHS Lanarkshire previously maintained a large number of servers across it's estate, a large number of which were dedicated and under utilised.  The backup solution was outdated and inefficient and the server infrastructure lacked flexibility to grow.

Solution

Northgate implemented a server virtualisation solution, consolidating 170 of the 350 servers onto 20 physical servers.  To further support the virtual infrastructure, a lifecycle management solution has been deployed to monitor the infrastructure and a central data storage and backup solution was also deployed. 

Result

With the introduction of a scaled, virtualised environment, NHS Lanarkshire have achieved significant cost savings and efficiencies in terms of reduction in capital and maintenance costs, power consumption, carbon footprint and server room cooling.

Challenge

With approximately 850,000 patients and 1.3million records, NHS Lothian sought a solution which supported their drive to be more proactive in data privacy and security.

Solution

Northgate delivered a privacy surveillance solution which processes the records from multiple healthcare applications by pulling audit files from each system identified to be monitored.  The surveillance is non-evasive and systematically identifies users who are engaging in patient record access patterns that are indicative of snooping, password sharing and other suspicious behaviour.

Result

Improved data security and patient confidence as well as generating efficiencies by replacing the manual review process with an automated system.

Challenge

The NHS Shetland network had grown organically over time making it difficult to manage, diagnose problems and resolve faults.  In addition, the server room did not conform to industry standards with poor cable management and high temperatures.

Solution

Northgate provided consultancy services to support NHS Shetland in developing a network strategy that would provide a much more manageable, efficient and secure platform.

Result

As a result of the new network there has been a substantial reduction in helpdesk faults, reducing the impact on service delivery and staff productivity.

Challenge

NI Blood Transfusion needed to minimise downtime and ensure high availability of their IT systems for all users,  to ensure smooth processing and delivery of blood supply in Northern Ireland

Solution

The implementation of a dedicated service desk supporting all staff, devices, back office servers, printers and critical business applications and systems. Theis is supported by onsite, remote and telephone support to the remote blood collection units and head office.

Results

A noticeable improvement in performance levels by the end users in areas such as availability and direct access to support which is now on a 24/7 basis, which has resulted in improved customer services, increased efficiencies, improved security and increased staff productivity.

Challenge

With  32km of shelf space being used to store over 5million patient records, document storage has resulted in significant cost and security implications and a solution was required to reduce internal costs, facilities and storage costs whilst improving protection and access to records.

Solution

The introduction of a Document Management and Storage solution which digitally records the clinical records of all existing and new patients into a an electronic storage solution in which the data related to an individuals health is readily and securely available.

Results

The delivery of enhanced security as well as significant time and cost saving efficiencies