Press room: Tue, 27 Jan 2009
Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust to achieve NHS Spine Compliance with Quicksilva
Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust (HEFT) has selected Quicksilva to enable it to securely and compliantly access the NHS Spine, the central National database, in real-time. This is part of the Foundation Trust's aim to ensure the highest levels of patient data quality across the organisation.
Quicksilva will provide to HEFT a combination of its Compliance-in-a-Box® consultancy service, its Spine Gateway™ managed service and its Spine-in-a-Box® test harness. This will allow the Foundation Trust to access the Personal Demographics Service (PDS) on the NHS Spine and ensure completion of NHS Connecting for Health's (CfH) Common Assurance Process. The work will be completed in 2009.
While foundation trusts are independent from the CfH programme, HEFT aims to lead the sector in deploying best practice by becoming compliant for the benefit of patients and staff. The Trust achieved foundation status in April 2005.
Andy Laverick, Director of ICT, Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust, said: "At the Foundation Trust we aim to ensure the most advanced and patient-friendly service possible. Advanced technology is central to achieving this goal. Direct connections between our system and the NHS Spine will drive major advantages in data quality and will underpin new services such as Choose and Book. While we have a high level of capabilities internally we chose Quicksilva as its combination of compliance experience and technical knowledge enables us to achieve compliance quickly and cost-effectively."
Due to the high level of security and complexity involved in transferring patient information, systems wishing to connect to the NHS Spine have to undergo rigorous testing in order to achieve compliance. Quicksilva's compliance consultancy service manages the complete connection and compliance process, removing the technical and administrative overhead from individual NHS Trusts or software suppliers. This enables any system to be connected securely to the NHS Spine, whatever data format it uses. Quicksilva has wide experience of the compliance process having nearly completed over 20 successful passes, with another 30 in the pipeline.
Gayna Hart, managing director, Quicksilva, said: "Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust is rightly well-known as a leader in the healthcare sector. This project further demonstrates its proactive approach to achieving compliance in improving the experience of both patients and staff. With much of the focus for NHS Connecting for Health now switching to ongoing operations we expect Heart of England to be the first of many healthcare organisations looking to cost-effectively integrate existing systems with the Spine."
