They are

• Based at London’s world renowned Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), the Haemophilia Centre team look after children with bleeding disorders. The blood disorders they treat are usually inherited and often congenital including: haemophilia, von Willebrand disease and a range of coagulation factor deficiencies.
• The team consists of nurses, doctors and physiotherapists. The nurses coordinate care at the hospital as well as at home.
• Engaged in an active, international, research programme including outcome measures and quality of life assessment.

They needed

• A centre-based, secure multi-user system to record, search and report their data.
• Integration with GOSH’s Patient Information Management System (PIMS) to automatically import hospital-based patient information and to gain the hospital’s unique identifier.
• Data at their fingertips for patient management or for use in research and outcome measures.
• Specialist reports to track the very expensive coagulation factor products that are prescribed to their patients and the provision of a billing system to invoice either the relevant Local Health Authorities or in the case of private patients, their families and or sponsoring embassy.

We provided

• Friendly consultation with the assurance of our many years of experience in designing and implementing solutions for the medical community. This led to a graphically illustrated, design specification
• An MS Access database with an intuitive and attractive user interface aiding fast data entry.
• Drop down lists for many data entry options with the ability to add, edit and delete list items via the menu.
• Collaboration with the hospital’s information team to provide a dynamic link to the hospital’s PIMS data to ensure accuracy and integrity and avoid duplication.
• Reports for the team’s patient management and research and administrative reports for their invoicing requirements.
• Separation of the user interface and the data database to ensure future changes to the application could be achieved off-site and without affecting the team’s data.
• On-site installation of the new system and subsequent support to help the haemophilia team during the transition.

"The haemophilia database is an asset to the team and service, providing timely data management with an ability to ask questions about care delivery. Over the past 13 years the database has been the one constant within an ever changing NHS IT system and allows prompt data retrieval for evidenced based care and research"

Kate Khair
Nurse Consultant

And the end result?

• A robust and dependable system that allows easy data entry and searching for several users at any one time.
• A specialist data solution that is integrated with the hospital’s patient information system.
• The provision of critical patient case reports at the click of a button.
• A series of reports that help the team keep track of expenditure and costs with an in-built process to invoice local health authorities and private patients.
• Data to publish in leading research publications, as well as to illustrate presentations on outcomes of treatment to funding bodies.