INFORMATION SYSTEMS
pendent idea; it was our idea, and belongs to North Bristol NHS Trust. At the concep- tion of the idea, the National Programme for IT was in the ascendancy; but quite early on I saw that irrespective of what that National Programme did or did not do in the future, that this would be a gap.
“And I think now, x number of years on, it remains a gap: there is a need for access to a safe, secure, ‘looks and feels the same’, common platform, easy to maintain, easy to use, easy to confi gure, data collection for clinical audit, for local interest, for sup- plementing systems that might have gaps in them, and so on. This is for clinicians primarily, but there is no reason why this has to be clinical. We certainly have some non-clinical CISSes: we have one running in the canteen for example. So the principle is around data collection and ‘mini-apps’.”
In the past it would have seemed strange for a public sector body to go around mar- keting its own services and products to other parts of the public sector, but today
North Bristol is hardly alone in thinking it could make some money out of an innova- tive idea.
Asked if the Trust had received any interest in CISS from elsewhere, Bell told us: “The short answer is yes. It’s gone quite well, and we wouldn’t want to be over complacent, but during 2009-10 we took the conscious decision to start actively marketing and got some interest, having got at that time maybe 25 CISSes up and running. That was a good solid base on which to base it.
“Then, during 2010-11, we had quite a big push, and we’ve had sales across the South West region, and some success in other parts of the county: the Midlands, the North West. So, what we’re looking at, at the moment, is how we can try to maximise that reach across the country.
“We’re not going to try to create a sales force: that’s not what we’re into. What we do want to do is effectively promote an application that we are going to keep run-
ning and developing, because it fi xes some of our clinical and operational problems, and helps us to deliver clinical and opera- tional service. We’re going to keep making that available for a very reasonable fee, to NHS colleagues. We may need some kind of assistance selling it, which is our current status.”
For other Trusts interested in using the CISS idea, do the applications tend to re- place existing systems, or do something that Trusts currently aren’t doing at all?
Bell told us: “The answer is a little bit of yes to both. First of all, it absolutely, in my view, replaces these individual access da- tabases which doctors, nurses and physios have, and to control them.
“It’s absolutely not there at all as an elec- tronic patient record, nothing like that at all, its not on that scale. I guess if you had the money you could turn it into one, but that’s not what we’re about. But if your Trust has got a terribly nice pathology sys- tem, and that delivers 90% of your data requirements, then with CISS, because it’s linked to all of the other systems, you can actually pull information from pathology, and maybe pull in information from radiol- ogy, and then a third component that you want to put in, maybe around clinical audit, maybe around the decision-tree process, perhaps to support a particular pathway of care. So, there’s a variety of small, targeted applications, that a large enterprise system would only very rarely be able to do itself. There are one or two commercial products that claim to be in that space, but that’s without the healthcare bent.”
Talking of commercial partners, did the de- velopment team have to enlist outside help to create the CISS idea?
Bell said: “No, it was developed in-house. Very occasionally, the team that has written CISS also does interfacing, they do data in- tegration, data migration, so there’s a whole other load of things that they do, so you know, as I think any sensible organisation would, if we have a blip that’s above our in- house resource, then we very occasionally get a bit of contract resource.
But that’s
just generally, it’s very rare and I try and steer away from using con- tractors generally, so no the system was de- veloped in house.
Martin Bell FOR MORE INFORMATION
Visit
www.nbt.nhs.uk/information_ management/
clinical_information_system.aspx
national health executive Jul/Aug 11 | 39
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