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Hart green-lights major Welsh projects

Tags: contract

08 Jan 2009

Edwina Hart,
Welsh Health
Minister

Welsh health minister Edwina Hart has approved the outline business case for the roll out of the Individual Health Record across Wales.

The decision to approve the roll out to GP surgeries and unscheduled care providers comes with £4.7m of new funding to cover the roll out and support for seven years.

Informing Healthcare will now develop a full business case for the roll out, which will start in the 2009-10 financial year.

A spokesperson for the programme said no decisions had been taken about how the procurement process would work or how many contracts would be awarded.

So far, the IHR has been successfully trialled in Gwent, where Graphnet was the contractor for the project which extracts demographic and other basic patient details from GP systems so it can be shared with out-of-hours and other care providers.

CSW Health won the contract for North West and South West Wales, but its involvement ended when it went into administration in November. A considerable amount of preparation work had been done, with 100% of GP practices signed up.

Informing Healthcare’s spokesperson indicated that since national roll out will be phased it may start in North West and South West Wales. However, she stressed that no decisions have been made on deployment schedules or timescales. For the moment, the Gwent project will continue.

Hart’s decision only affects unscheduled care services. The IHR is being used in one medical assessment unit in Gwent and further acute trials are planned. But a wide-scale acute roll out would probably require a further business case.

The IHR roll out is the second major announcement affecting Informing Healthcare programmes to be made in the past fortnight. Just before Christmas, Hart also approved £7.9m plans to replace the 13 computer systems in Wales’ 18 main pathology laboratories with a single system.

She said the current systems were approaching the end of their technical life and a single system would deliver staff and patient benefits, making it easier for staff to move between sites and making results more readily available.

Informing Healthcare’s chair, Ian Kelsall, said it was very pleased the two business cases had been approved and its work would now gather pace.

However, the programme does not expect the “long, detailed and very complex” procurement of the laboratory information system to be complete before the end of the financial year 2009/10.

Lyn Whitfield

Reader's Comments

it can't possibly work

08 Jan 09 11:01

what, an IT project without multinational corporations, obstruse and opaic contracts, pointless system replacements, hundreds of consultants, billions of pounds and lots of people shouting at each other?

call that a health record?

18 into one sounds a bit risky

andy.hadley@ferndown.nhs.uk

09 Jan 09 20:01

I think NPfIT failed to consider contingency planning adequately. Fine to have two datacentres working perfectly, but if one faced a major disaster, clinical service resilience demands that especially if a neighbouring NHS facility is knocked out or under stress, the remainder are able to pick up the slack. Certainly across the South, neighbours were all indended for the same configuration, and I believe single points of failure were not adequately addressed.

So I think Wales needs to be a bit cautious. If the procurement is for a single supplier, with facilities covering the 18 labs, that may have value in standardisation (though I'd prefer the use of standards eg HL7). A single configuration could have the nasty side effect of unexpectedly crippling the whole principality, no matter how resilient the supplier claims it to be.

But are they intending that all results from Swansea need to be available in Harlech ? One of the lessons of Wessex RISP, never learned, is that surely a local integration of Pathology with everything else, is far more important than creating one universal departmental system, with barriers to linking to other elements of the clinical record ?

Do not Underestimate Manpower Requirements!

10 Jan 09 10:01

It is fantastic news that Wales is on the verge of WAG budget approval for a EHR rollout. However Wales has a very finite HI workforce and to ensure success the right Health Informatics Professionals need to be considered, and the workforce expanded. Without the right people in place this initiative could potentially wander and could very well fail.

Again this is great news for patients in Wales to have the ability for any clinican in Principality to be able to view there medical history at a touch of a button. What about if a Welsh patient takes a day trip to england or I live on the boarder? I am sure that English clinicans will not look forward to the possiblities of accessing a Welsh based system as well as an English based EHR. Therefore, there will be a lot of work to be investigated in terms of interoperability between all the home nation systems and strategies.

Hope springs eternal

12 Jan 09 10:01

Re "It can't possibly work" Don't worry, it probably won't. Wales has many positive attributes that would help with a national EHR across the Principality, such as sense of regional identity, freeedom from English DoH & its National Programme, financial sovereignty, but it still hasn't taken a step jump in IT terms. Why should this be any different?