NHS Trafford Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) is opening an IT-driven centre to co-ordinate healthcare in the region.
The Patient Care Co-ordination Centre (PCCC) will ensure that departmental systems across the NHS Trafford Trust are connected, enabling patient progress through the system to be tracked and vulnerable patients to be monitored closely.
All this is to be underpinned by an IT infrastructure that will feature a single patient directory. The tender notice, put out in October 2013, said the total contract would be worth £13m over five years, with the option to extend.
IT services company Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) has been selected by Trafford CCG to create the Patient Care Co-ordination Centre in Altrincham.
The PCCC will integrate various systems to provide a single point of access and monitor patients.
The centre, now in its implementation phase, will be co-ordinating the care of patients by the summer.
Nigel Guest, chief clinical officer at NHS Trafford CCG, said the centre will help co-ordinate activity across primary, acute, community and mental health sectors.
“The PCCC is a key element of our strategy for delivering high-quality, co-ordinated healthcare to the Trafford population,” he said.
Guest said CSC was chosen partly because of its strong track record in the NHS.
Healthcare is one of CSC’s strongest businesses in the UK. For example, Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust recently replaced its patient administration system with CSC Lorenzo. And in December 2014, Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust announced its decision to use the same system. In total, 13 NHS trusts use the software.
Earlier in February, the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) set out a five-year technology strategy that aims to make the UK a world leader in the development and use of health and social care apps by 2020.
HSCIC, which describes itself as “a national provider of high-quality information, data and IT systems for health and social care” and is sponsored by the Department of Health, already supports core NHS England systems such as Summary Care Records, e-prescriptions and the central NHS Spine messaging infrastructure.