Quicksilva’s orQestra now boosting patient data accuracy in radiology and audiology departments with access to Personal Demographics Service
NHS staff at Medway NHS Foundation Trust are being given real-time access to the NHS’s Personal Demographic Service (PDS), with a new software system from Quicksilva, an independent supplier of healthcare IT systems. Quicksilva’s orQestra ITK Spine Mini Service will enable staff to share patient information between departments more effectively and ensure that all of the data held is accurate and correlates with PDS.
Medway Maritime Hospital treats around 1,800 patients from across Kent every day. Around 275 of those patients need care from the Emergency Department and 200 plus patients are admitted for hospital care and treatment. Many systems within the Medway NHS Foundation Trust are unable to connect to the current Patient Administration System (PAS), and as a result leave the Clinical Services whose systems are not interfaced with PAS, with the responsibility of maintaining the data quality of patient demographics whilst performing a front-line service delivery. In practice the demands of delivering services outweighs the efforts needed to clean and maintain patient demographic data and means that opportunities to improve data quality suffer.
Staff at the Trust have already begun connecting up its radiology and audiology information management systems, the databases responsible for overall management of the departments, from booking X-ray appointments to managing beds. This allows staff to get the information they need for any patient that comes in, no matter where they live, and staff can also ensure that they are compensated for patient treatment. Next, the Trust plans to rollout the system across more units over the course of 2014 in order to introduce better data quality across every hospital department.
Brian Hughes, Business Intelligence Manager, Medway NHS Foundation Trust said: “Access to accurate patient records is vital for us, if the wrong information goes against a patient such as an incorrect NHS number it can lead to financial penalties for us. orQestra will allow us to stop relying on manually obtained patient information, and enable our clinical staff to spend less time on administrative tasks which are prone to error and concentrate on the quality of service delivered to patients.”
Gayna Hart, managing director of Quicksilva, said: “Accurate patient records are absolutely essential if NHS organisations are to give patients first class treatment and report accurately against their treatment. NHS numbers are soon to become mandatory and from 2015 we’ll see more organisations suffering financial penalties if they don’t look to improve accuracy.”
“The orQestra system was the first end-to-end service to be accredited under the NHS Connecting for Health’s Interoperability ToolKit (ITK). It will help Medway to rollout a more streamlined, cost-efficient administration system, meaning that staff have more time to spend on providing patient care; “she concluded.
Source: Quicksilva
19 December 2013
Latest Articles
Software, NHS, patient data, IT solutions, Quicksilva, patient records, hospital
Quicksilva’s orQestra now boosting patient data accuracy in radiology and audiology departments with access to Personal Demographics Service NHS staf...
