CfH to pilot clinical dashboards

Tags: Information iS Quality Strategic System C

15 May 2009

NHS Connecting for Health has awarded a contract to System C to design, develop and pilot Clinical Intelligence Systems, or clinical dashboards, over the next nine months.

Under a £3.2m framework contract, System C will develop and implement the Clinical Intelligence Systems in over a dozen NHS trusts, across all ten English Strategic Health Authorities.

E-Health Insider understands the clinical dashboards will involve developing feeds from potentially dozens of different clinical IT systems that will then feed into personalisable dashboards. The project is expected to make use of Common User Interface design concepts developed by Microsoft and NHS Connecting for Health.

The concept of clinical dashboards was highlighted in the final report of Lord Darzi’s Next Stage Review of the NHS, published last June. This emphasisied the critical need to use and act on quality measures.

The review said every provider of NHS services urgently needed tools to systematically measure, analyse and improve quality.

The part-time health minister and surgeon said this data should be displayed to staff through 'clinical dashboards' to measure their performance and use the information to make continuous improvements.

Ian Denley, the chief executive of System C, told E-Health Insider: “All the trusts who are to participate in the Clinical Intelligence Systems pilot have been identified, with work on the project already underway.”

As part of the deal System C will also supply training and knowledge transfer to local NHS organisations.

This will be focused on building in-house development capability to change and enhance the new Clinical Intelligence Systems, including the ability to extend the tools to support other clinical specialties, services and practices.

The contract was awarded to System C following an Additional Supply Capability and Capacity (ASCC) procurement carried out last year.

Jon Hoeksma

Readers Comments

IPR

16 May 09 23:36

And has CfH learned anything about using Open-Source principles, or even paying the company to develop dashboards that the NHS might own the IPR on ?

Or is this yet another part funded development that those beyond the pilots will have to pay locally and dearly to participate in down the line, with all the clinical input and NHS expertise given to the supplier to sell back to us ?

IPR response

jo.siers@systemc.com

19 May 09 16:37

One of the key benefits to NHS organisations of the CfH Programme for Clinical Dashboards is that the IPR for all dashboard metrics developed with the participating Trusts will be retained by NHS CfH and will be lodged in a metrics repository, which is a key Programme deliverable.

IPR response response

21 May 09 20:21

The response from System C didn't address the totality of the original comment which related to ALL IPR, i.e. including the source code. The SystemC response just related to the IPR associated with the clinical metrics.

The original post also mentioned the issue of whether the application framework was proprietary and hence costs would be incurred for every deployment - this too wasn't addressed by the SystemC response.

So, let's have a more specific response from SystemC (or CfH for that matter) to the above points please.