Data pump delivers for the flagship of the NHS

University Hospitals of Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust (UHCW) is proving a standard bearer for all that’s best in the UK health service. Its new University ‘Super’ Hospital is the largest in the country, seeing 1 million patients a year, and with 30,000 appointments each week. It employs hundreds of top specialists, has low waiting times, superb clinical and teaching facilities and, technologically-wise, is the best equipped in Western Europe. In a hospital boasting a purpose-built helicopter pad, the only PET scanner outside London, Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) – for touch of a button X-Rays - as well as Internet, TV and radio access for every patient bed, the technology department cannot afford to simply keep up – it has to be pioneering.

Electronic storage
Nick Elliott, Chief Technology Officer at UHCW, is at the forefront of a department leading the way in many fields. As the NHS moves towards electronic storage and recording of records, he needed to make sure UHCW got it right. To ensure vital hospital space was not consumed in the physical storage of masses of paper, it was decided to outsource storage and delivery of patient records to a partner from the private sector, TNT. This meant it was essential that the daily list of records required, generated by the hospital’s legacy appointments system, had to be converted to a format that could be shared with TNT’s systems. Here Datawatch’s Monarch Data Pump server came in to its own.
    
Mr. Elliott considered developing a system in-house, but this would not have been possible in the time-frame required. Deploying Monarch Data Pump, and using the expertise of Datawatch’s consultants, meant that the system was built, tested and working in a week: “They understood the problem, the urgency; responded flexibly to help us, including coming on site to ensure that the system was up and running on time,” Mr. Elliott explains.
    
Delays could have meant patients arriving at appointments without the right notes being delivered in time, and this was unacceptable: “Every day counted,” Mr. Elliott adds. Installation is only half the story of course. Other applications will be required in the future, and here Mr. Elliott was very pleased with the report-mining method that underpins Datawatch’s solutions: “It’s much better than a programming approach,” he says. “It makes the system easier to maintain, as models and projects can be altered or developed by non-technical staff, so the process is not dependent on IT resources”.
    
Importantly for an NHS Trust looking to the future, Monarch Data Pump server offers potential: “It allows us to consider other ways of sharing data internally, as well as with other hospitals and with other private sector partners,” says Mr.. Elliott, and adds: “I expect to be using the Data Pump server for more projects, and to make more use of Datawatch’s model-building services. I’m also sending two members of staff on a training course to give them the skills to maintain the system and extend its use.”
    
With a keen eye for potential, the technology head was quick to spot Data Pump’s: “Not only for medical records – but for all situations where data from legacy systems needs to be shared or transformed. Certainly every hospital should consider Data Pump to help in these situations”.

Monarch Data Pump
Monarch Data Pump (MDP) combines Datawatch’s Monarch Report Mining/Data Mining engine with the Microsoft .NET framework to mine and transform existing reports and PDF files into ready, actionable data, without programming. MDP also works with databases, spreadsheets and other data sources, for easy creation and delivery of customised data across an organisation, in an easily administered system. Using MDP, end users receive the customised data they need, on an automatic, scheduled basis, while the demands on IT for help with report writers or database queries are sharply reduced.

Datawatch
Datawatch, a leader in Enterprise Information Management, helps organisations increase productivity and save costs by enabling them to automatically distribute, share and analyse information, in the form of reports, documents or data, across their enterprise, far more easily, more rapidly and less expensively than its competitors.

For more information
Call 0800 622 826 for more information on Monarch Data Pump, a copy of the Report Mining White Paper and to participate in an online demonstration.
Email: kris.smith@datawatch-europe.com
Web: www.datawatch-europe.com