Just over a year ago my colleagues wrote a blog about why our Synopsis perioperative platform complements a hospitals EPR strategy. As I’ve traveled around the UK meeting with Clinicians, CIO’s and hospital leaders it struck me that most NHS Acute Trusts have already invested heavily (or are about to) in large-scale Electronic Patient Record projects in order to meet the Five Year Forward View – Paperless 2020 goal and more recently the recommendations of the Wachter Review for a digital NHS.
As large-scale EPR projects continue, it’s important not to overlook the benefits of best of breed: products that have been painstakingly designed to work very well for specific things.
It’s possible, but unlikely, that any one project or supplier will have all the answers…
It’s possible, but unlikely, that any one project or supplier will have all the answers to all the challenges found in every hospital. That’s why there are great examples of collaboration and partnership springing up around the NHS.
Choosing best of breed need not mean fragmentation for users, nor of your data. Modern systems are specifically designed to communicate with one-another (interoperability). Most make use of the communications standards, concepts and vocabularies provided by organisations such as Health Level 7 (HL7).
All of this means that choosing best of breed can compliment, rather than harm, your large-scale EPR project. Information entered into the specialist system can (and is) shared with the larger system. Similarly, the larger system can aggregate and “feed” the smaller system.
Examples include sharing results, alerts, outcomes, documents, scores, decisions, handovers and much more.
Combined, we can create a highly resilient and flexible model. A digital ecosystem.
It combines the scale, quality and reach of large systems with the expert, often near-bespoke and in-depth functionality of best of breed systems. It can dramatically improve the quality of information, because it’s entered fewer times and then used by all systems.
As we’ve delivered Synopsis iQ to Trusts around the NHS, we have delivered stable and highly functional links between various systems. Synopsis is working well with some of the largest names in e-health. As a result, we’re working as part of that flexible ecosystem to create solutions that work for all “layers” and contexts.
Why not give the team a call for an informal discussion and to explore how best of breed would assist your EPR strategy?
