PA Consulting Group has been appointed by the Scottish Executive Health Department (SEHD) to work on the Scottish Care Information (SCI) project announced yesterday by John Aldrich, Finance Director, SEHD, at the SCI launch seminar.
The objective of the project is to deliver seamless patient care, so that wherever patients enter the health service, comprehensive information is readily available to the clinician, GP or hospital consultant.
This is part of a broader SEHD initiative to give clinicians ‘the tools for the job’. The Health Minister, Susan Deacon, recently announced the Electronic Clinical Communication Implementation project (ECCI) which seeks to establish best practice in the sharing of information throughout the service.
Working in partnership with the Scottish NHS and other suppliers including SEMA, PA’s role is to develop new generation software for use in hospital trusts. This will enable hospitals to connect to GPs, providing clinical and administration functionality and including close integration with primary care systems. The systems will be rolled out later this year and through 2001 and follow on from the award-winning partnership between the NHS and PA in the delivery of primary care systems. This will provide the main component of Electronic Patient Records (EPR) and Electronic Health Records (EHR)– a major objective of the NHS’s IM&T strategy.
The result will be a truly integrated NHS – a key plank in the Government’s agenda to modernise the Health Service. The system will make external use of Intranet technologies in a seamless, and robust way, ensuring complete confidentiality of patient information.
PA’s project director, Terry Channell, said: "We are very excited about our involvement in delivering this step change in the use of computers by hospital trusts. This work follows on from our successful partnership in developing the primary care system (GPASS) and we are achieving the same level of success with the SCI initiative."
