The Single Patient Management System (PMS) has moved a step closer with the recent move of waiting list and inpatients for acute specialities from the Helix system to TOPAS. This followed the case record tracking which moved over in February 2014. Helix will be completely switched off once the interfaces with SCI Store have been finalised – until then users will continue to access the Master Patient Index (MPI) on Helix.
The latest part of the project was completed in less than a year and has been described as a “fantastic achievement” by Agnes Provan, Head of Health Record Services. She said: “We have seen more than 700 staff trained and over 800,000 health records, 700,000 case record locations and 2,200 inpatient waiting list entries migrated. In addition, more than 9,000 inpatient admissions have been manually re-keyed.
“Staff from eHealth, ICT, Information Services and many from Health Record Services worked over the weekend ensuring a seamless transition and as little disruption to systems and services as possible. Thanks to them and the support of Cambric, the system supplier, there was minimum disruption.
At the moment TOPAS is used for:
- Tracking patients’ health record movements in acute services
- Managing the acute services outpatient waiting list and appointments
- Managing the daycase and inpatient waiting list and admissions
- Clinical coding
The benefits to local staff and patients include
- Potential to provide real time patient information at point of need via Clinical Portal
- Enhanced Patient safety through improved data quality
- Improved patient administration processes
- Improved efficiency in statutory reporting
- Reduced duplication of data entry
- Lower maintenance costs for systems
- Reduced interfaces with other systems
- Standardised system admin support
The next stage of the Single PMS will involve a major software development of the TOPAS outpatient module. This will allow the Patient Information Management System (PiMS) to be decommissioned and the data it stores to be integrated with TOPAS.
