They are

• Great Ormond Street Hospital’s, Cystic Fibrosis (CF) team which includes consultants and highly trained nurses and physiotherapists.
• Specialists in the care of children with CF which is the UK’s most common life-threatening inherited disease, affecting over 7,500 people. CF affects internal organs, particularly the lungs and digestive system. Children with CF require daily medication and physiotherapy. The average life expectancy is approximately 31 years, although improvements in treatments mean that a baby born today may be expected to live longer.
• Providers of shared care with regional paediatricians and general practitioners.
• Regular contributors to medical journals in the field of Cystic Fibrosis research.

They needed

• Software to record all their patient details including demographic data, clinical information and treatments received, in a secure, on-site database.
• Functionality to support the reporting of the yearly review of every patient's treatment and the automation of personalised letters to their GPs.
• Dynamic production of z scores for growth parameters including height, weight and body mass index.
• Charts showing progress in terms of lung function and growth as well as longitudinal results for a range of laboratory tests.
• Flexible searching facilities of data for use in their active research programme.

We provided

• Expertise and experience in designing and implementing software solutions for medical and health based projects.
• Story boards and graphic screen shots to allow the team to visualize the proposed software.
• A database that allowed fast multi-user access via menus and user friendly data-entry screens.
• Seamless linkage to word processing and graphical software to produce dynamic calculations, charts, reports, personalised letters and patient reviews.
• Support to the cystic fibrosis team in the form of on-site training as well as our responsive telephone and email response support.

And the end result?

• A robust, dependable system that allows the team to securely record, search and report their data.
• The Cystic Fibrosis team can create the graphs, charts, letters and reviews they need to support their valuable work.
• All the Great Ormond Street Hospital’s Cystic Fibrosis data, current and historical is in the same place. This enables treatment comparisons and brings together data which forms the basis of their international research projects.

"The cystic fibrosis unit at Great Ormond Street hospital provides comprehensive specialist care to approximately 200 children with cystic fibrosis. Our association with Advent IT began in 1995 with the development of a clinical & research database, to store patient data, query / report and produce clinical lettersand reports . Since then two major upgrades have been undertaken to further develop and tailor the database to our specific requirements. As well as upgrading the database, the team at Advent IT have always provided us with support and technical help, responding to our queries in a timely manner and with the utmost sensitivity and professionalism. It has been a pleasure to work with Ian and the team at Advent IT and we look forward to this continuing for many more years."
S Ammani Prasad FCSP
Research Physiotherapist — Cystic Fibrosis Unit