Efficiency and accuracy improvements for informatics reporting frees up expert staff time
NHS Rotherham implements NDL’s ‘awi’ desktop application integration software to automate manual transactions.

NHS Rotherham uses the TPP SystmOne application to manage and coordinate patient care records for its community based services. Key reports must be produced on a regular basis to enable the trust’s performance to be analysed for the benefit of the patients and to enable the trust to monitor performance and compliance with national standards.

Administrators of the TPP SystmOne application are therefore tasked with the production of Minimum Data Set (MDS) extracts on a regular basis. The SystmOne MDS extraction methodology in use at Rotherham has no in-built automation or scheduling capabilities, so the procedure is very laborious and is susceptible to error. With the Trust having to contend with over 40 individual SystmOne units, considerable effort is needed to complete this repetitive task. This is very tedious and the basic procedure was consuming the time equivalent of 1 skilled person for at least 1 day each per month.

NDL’s awi^DX application integration toolset was implemented to automate the interactive processes within SystmOne that are needed to produce MDS data extracts. In the case of NHS Rotherham the initial prototype was up and running within one hour, including automating the naming and saving of the results files.
The solution is fully compliant with roles-based authentication and the entire MDS extraction procedure is now fully automated, enabling the skilled users to concentrate on more proactive work. The solution is also increasing the scope of reports that can be produced on a repetitive basis facilitating greater complexity of report production.

When asked what the key benefits would be as a result of this, Alan Meloy, Deputy Head of IT at Rotherham NHS commented, “The key benefit to Rotherham is increased efficiency. We have managed to free up 1 skilled staff member to concentrate on proactive tasks. In addition this would result in removing tedious, repetitive tasks, reducing the potential for mistakes and reduce the elapsed time for information to be made available for analysis.” He also commented that “this new approach would allow report extracts to be run more frequently therefore providing far more accuracy than previously available.”