Shropshire Star

Shropshire hospital trust's £800,000 digital project

The trust running Shropshire's major hospitals is looking to spend more than £800,000 on a "data warehouse" to hold patient information.

Published

Shrewsbury & Telford Hospital NHS Trust (Sath) has advertised for a company to carry out the work, which would bring together information that is currently held on a number different systems.

The contract is worth £813,000, and is expected to last around two and a half years, with work starting on Monday, June 3, at the latest.

Julie Waters, chief information officer at Sath, said the system would provide a platform to move away from using paper records, and towards a new Electronic Patient Record, where information is held digitally.

She said: “The trust recognises the scale of digital transformation needed to move ahead with efficient, effective healthcare delivery fit for the modern age.

“As part of our journey towards a new Electronic Patient Record system, we need to underpin our digital foundations with robust and stable footings.

“A new data warehouse will provide the foundation to ensure that data from a number of different hospital systems is brought together in a well-structured way which will improve our ability to provide information across the whole organisation and beyond. This will support frontline staff to monitor safety, outcomes, patient experience, and deliver quality care.”

The advert explains how the system is needed to provide a way to combine records.

It states: "The trust currently has what would be widely known in the industry as a ‘reporting database’ that has evolved organically from former MS Excel and MS Access data repositories and eventually became reported from MS SQL Server, the industry standard product.

"While the product is modern, the data architecture (how the data is stored, structured and designed) is not. Therefore there is a requirement to move to a fully modelled data warehouse where the data structures underlying reporting, are designed based on the trust’s business requirements."

The brief also explains the requirements of the "stable, consolidated, structured data warehousing model".

It wants the system to "provide a transparent view of patient care and all associated activity captured across the various systems in use within the trust".

It also asks the supplier to ensure that it simplifies "the complexities of reporting ensuring accuracy and also a reduction in the amount of time required to turnaround routine reporting requests".