INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
and send less to contractors – “keeping money in the organisation”.
Clinical decision support, works Another aid to improving the efficiency and quality of pathology services is to make sure clinicians are ordering the right tests. On day two, Steve Herman, Medical Director of MedCurrent, outlined the case for building clinical decision support into systems like ICE.
CDS is well established in radiology,
where NHS England designated a portion of the £250 million funding of the Digital Diagnostics Capability Programme to rollout the iRefer tool recommended by national reports and the Getting It Right First Time programme.
It is less common in pathology, but
Herman outlined the results of a pilot at Princess Alexandra NHS Foundation Trust, which has used MedCurrent to make The Royal College of Pathologists guidance on repeat testing available to clinicians. Using the system for just seven tests saved £47,000 in five months; and stopped a lot of unnecessary bleeding for often old, frail patients. “The NHS is looking for technology to streamline workflows and improve efficiency,” Herman pointed out. “I believe we have shown CDS can shorten waiting times in radiology and save money for pathology.”
Top tips for testing and security Any IT system needs to be properly deployed, though. Also on day two, Janine Bontoft, Programme Director at Clinisys, gave the conference her top tips for testing, gained from years of experience in deploying ICE, LIMS, blood tracking, and other systems in the NHS.
New ICE uses application programming interfaces or APIs to exchange information with other systems, so integrations can be managed by the customer as workflows change or new providers come on stream
Her first tip: don’t just focus on ‘functional testing’ aka “does it do what it is meant to do?” and instead ask: “Is it behaving as we would expect it to behave out in the real world?” And, linked to that, make sure the people who will be using a new system or upgrade are the ones testing it: “Don’t assume the workflow is what is written on paper.”
Bontoft also demonstrated a tool that she found invaluable. Cymetryc allows test scripts to be loaded and assigned to testers, who can pass or fail them, leave comments, and assign tasks to colleagues, IT teams, and suppliers. The whole process can be tracked on dashboards and exported as reports. In today’s world, systems must also be
secure. But Mark Dimock, NHS England’s Cyber Security Lead for the East of England, said a risk-based approach is needed. Yes, he told the conference, the National Cyber Security Centre has identified a host of cyber security risks. There’s cyber espionage, attacks on critical infrastructure, threats to the supply chain, ransomware (in which hackers lock systems and demand cash to unlock them) and phishing (in which hackers use pop-ups and emails to try and con users into handing over valuable personal information).
And yes, the NHS and its staff are under constant assault. “The only way to be completely secure is to turn off the computer and put it in a box and bury it.” That’s just not practical; so network managers need to think through their risks, log them on a risk register, and have documented procedures in place to address them. Also, he said, returning to an earlier theme, run up-to-date systems and patch them. “I know that if you have a big upgrade – a new ICE, or whatever – it can be disruptive, but you need to make sure you are running the most safe and secure systems that you can,” Dimock said.
Why it all matters – ‘think myeloma’ Rebuilding one of the NHS’s core systems, finding innovative ways to improve information sharing, adding- in CDS, thinking about security. The Clinisys ICE customer summit had a busy agenda.
But in the middle of it, Brogan Ashley, Head of Research at Myeloma UK, reminded everybody of why pathology and the technology that supports it matters so much. Myeloma is a blood cancer that arises in the bone marrow, she said, that mainly affects older people – although a quarter of those diagnosed are still working. It is hard to diagnose, because the symptoms are non-specific and GPs rarely see it – many people are diagnosed in A&E after suffering a potentially life-changing event, such as a broken back. But a package of diagnostic tests is available and can be built into ICE.
“The key thing is to enable people to ‘think myeloma’,” she said, “and to give clinicians the tools they need to easily order the correct batch of tests to make a diagnosis. We are working with some sites who’ve seen great results, and we are working with Clinisys to make it easy to implement.”
Matthew Fouracre is Marketing Manager at Clinisys Group.
Rebuilding one of the NHS’s core systems, finding innovative ways to improve information sharing, upgrading systems and thinking about security all came in to focus at the summit.
WWW.PATHOLOGYINPRACTICE.COM FEBRUARY 2025
Learn more about Clinysis ICE by visiting the website.
www.clinisys.com/uk/en/products/ clinisys-ice-en/
43
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60
