St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, one of the most technologically advanced hospitals in the country and IMS MAXIMS, a supplier of end-to-end electronic patient record systems have partnered to offer the NHS a fully integrated electronic patient record solution.
The organisations are working together to provide the NHS with a suite of tailored clinical and administrative software products that are proven to improve efficiency and enhance patient safety and outcomes.
The systems that the organisations are jointly offering range from large-scale systems to administer patient services across entire hospitals such as patient administrations systems, to more specialised packages for tasks such as bed management or pathology and radiology order communications.
The partnership means that NHS organisations across the UK that choose to work with St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and IMS MAXIMS will be able to call upon the expertise of a trusted healthcare IT company, combined with the first hand experience of an NHS team, to provide unrivalled capability and delivery for their healthcare IT systems.
Neil Darvill, director of health informatics at St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust said: "St Helens has worked with IMS MAXIMS to help us deliver our digitisation project for over 20 years.
"Working together, we've been able to achieve our paper-lite vision enabling us to streamline processes, improve efficiency and ensure that healthcare professionals have the best possible information at their finger tips to make the right decision for their patients."
Last month, Neil Darvill was announced as eHealth Insider's Healthcare IT Champion of the Year 2012 for bringing the trust to a point where virtually all patient services will be run electronically in the coming months and for his outstanding contribution to healthcare IT in the NHS.
Darvill added: "In light of our success, it made complete sense to combine our deployment expertise and first hand knowledge of what the NHS requires, with the solutions that IMS MAXIMS provides, so that we help to spread best practice working in partnership with the NHS and beyond."
St Helens and IMS MAXIMS are already working jointly on tender opportunities. They believe they have a unique offering to collaboratively tailor, configure, implement, host, undertake change management and provide the support for the systems that the NHS requires to meet the challenge of providing value based healthcare.
The organisations believe that now is a critical time to offer real, working systems to the NHS. This follows the focus in the Information Strategy, published earlier this year, to share information within and between local health providers and to capture just once at the point of care. In addition, market intelligence has shown that more than a quarter of NHS trusts are looking for an electronic patient record system to help them deliver on this.
Shane Tickell, CEO of IMS MAXIMS, said: "St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust shares the same aspiration as IMS MAXIMS, that is to provide a cradle to grave electronic patient record for all patients which is available at the right place and the right time. Our proof is the fact that we have already worked in partnership to design, plan and execute solutions that have had very tangible benefits to patients.
"Together we have a unique proposition to take to market that ensures we not only provide proven, agile systems to meet the NHS's growing challenges, but also that our culture of investing in the right people who truly understand the requirements of each individual organisation is embedded within everything that we do to ensure success."
About St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust
St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust provides a full range of acute in-patient, outpatient, day case and emergency services to the local communities of St Helens, Knowsley, parts of Halton and Liverpool, extending to the whole of Cheshire, Merseyside, North Wales and the Isle of Man with the Regional Plastic Surgery and Burns Unit. The trust aims is to provide a high quality service to all patients, striving to meet the best standards for professional care whilst being sensitive and responsive to the needs of individual patients.
As a teaching hospital trust, it has excellent educational and research relationships with the Universities of Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University. As Lead Employer, on behalf of the Mersey Deanery, it is responsible for over 2,000 trainee speciality doctors. The trust is the only acute trust in the country to have performed above the national average in every indicator for quality of services and care in the Care Quality Commission assessment (2010) and continues to be successful in providing high standards of services and care with a high level of patient safety CQC assessment (2011). It also has one of the lowest infection rates in the country for MRSA and C-Difficile.
About IMS MAXIMS
IMS MAXIMS is an electronic patient record provider working towards better, safer patient care. Specialists in developing clinical and administrative software solutions for healthcare providers, IMS MAXIMS currently supports more than 150 organisations, 11 million patient records in the UK, and 1.9 million patient records in Ireland, approx 50% of the population, as well as 20,000 users of IMS MAXIMS products.
MAXIMS is at the heart of the clinical and administrative life of everything from large UK and Irish hospitals, to small specialist independent clinics. It gives patient data to clinicians in exactly the format they need, and allows it to be shared with colleagues and updated in real-time. MAXIMS suits any clinical specialism and is excellent for order communications and reporting. Medical and administrative records can be kept fully up to date, with the minimum of effort. MAXIMS is web-based so there is no need to install software on computers or invest in expensive extra hardware.