Historically, interoperability has been an expensive and complicated challenge for England’s NHS to solve. And no less so for Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, a digitally advanced mental health, community and learning disability trust and one of only six of the country's mental health Global Digital Exemplars (GDE).

Empowering teams with interoperability

The trust, which provides physical, mental health and social care for people of all ages across Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Swindon, Wiltshire, Bath and North East Somerset, had three distinct priorities for an interoperability solution. They needed to share clinical information from their electronic patient record (EPR) with external NHS organisations, clinical information exchange from the EPR to external Child Health Information Services (CHIS) and also to be able to exchange data between the EPR and the trust’s pharmacy stock and dispensing system. They selected Enovacom’s Integration Engine technology, which could do all three.

Enovacom’s solution was unique in its ability to be used by non-technical staff, being optimised to transform data between standards and create interfaces without programming. Traditional proprietary integration engines sometimes require a team of integration architects to manage the creation of interfaces and their day-to-day management - and this was not what the Trust wanted.

Early efficiency savings for the trust

The solution quickly delivered benefits for the trust, improving the patient journey, by integrating information across children’s services, documents and pharmacy systems. It also empowered in-house staff, as interfaces were built in-house with minimal training required.

It reaped early efficiency savings for the Trust, including 408 hours saved annually on unnecessary data entry duplication. It also proved future fit, with foundations in place to scale up to a clinical portal.

“The Enovacom system empowers our internal teams, who do not have technical integration skills to make updates and changes quickly,” says Rachel Hanks, EPR technical project manager at the trust. “With Enovacom’s solution, there will be more opportunities to improve diagnosis and treatment because the information that clinicians need to make informed decisions will be available, rather than having to call up other organisations to find out about a patient’s care.”

A clinical portal to gather all patient activity from all systems

“Our clinicians are asking for the capability to see patient data from other systems within the trust so now we are designing the Enovacom platform so it can integrate all the clinical systems into one and then build a clinical portal so that clinicians can see all the patient activity from all the systems, before extending that reach to data within the local acute trust, Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. We will be integrating all internal and external systems in one user interface,” says Dr Fathi Saad, EPR systems integration manager at Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust.

Following the success of these first milestones, both organisations committed to share knowledge and experience with other NHS trusts building interoperability maturity. Enovacom will now work closely with the trust to create blueprints that outline learning and experiences from this project for other NHS trusts to digitise patient journeys at pace.

This case study is part of Enovacom’s Beyond Boundaries: The interoperability world tour guide.