Case Studies

NHS Connecting For Health

In the past, NHS’s customers historically managed their medical records on paper, which at times led to serious clinical issues when travelling patients needed emergency treatment. To overcome this and other issues, the NHS established the Connective for Health (CfH) programme to deliver computer systems and services that improve how patient information is stored and accessed.

CSC is at the forefront of deploying the programme for the NHS and has already rolled out its solution to more than 70 sites in the North West and West Midlands. This enables doctors and clinicians to access the central records database.

As a result of CSC’s performance, the NHS selected the company to take over responsibility for two additional implementation “clusters”, making CSC responsible for all English regions north of London.

A CSC solution

CSC’s solution enables NHS patients within the regions for which CSC is responsible to have an individual lifelong electronic care record, promoting seamless care for patients through physicians, hospitals and community services. The solution provides the ability to electronically book clinician appointments and referrals, electronically transfer prescriptions from clinicians to pharmacists and a knowledge base of clinical interventions.

Applying CSC’s CatalystSM methodology and GPF processes and tools, CSC provides full applications support and maintenance services. These include integration and test services relating to interfacing to and integrating with new third-party software releases from such companies as iSoft and BT.

Even though the systems roll-out across the healthcare network is still at an early stage, some key sites have already been implemented with encouraging results. At the University Hospital Birmingham Trust, one of the UK’s largest and most complex hospitals, administrators have already noticed a big improvement in the integrity of data now available.

Improving data integrity

Before the CfH programme, there was nothing to stop a patient administration system creating multiple identities for one individual. When the University Trust changed to the new system, it found 30,000 duplicates among the 750,000 records on its master patient index. With the new system, all records are matched in real time with a national database and are recorded against real, unambiguously identified, individuals. Today, CSC’s total contract value is in excess of £3Bn, with systems development costs estimated to be in excess of £50m and some 230 CSC staff engaged in applications development within this programme.