Dakota - Integrated Solutions

Lancashire Teaching Hospital

Background

• Lancashire Teaching Hospital enjoys “NHS Foundation Trust” status
• 6,000 staff across 2 sites at Preston and Chorley
• 1108 beds
• 246,000 Outpatients per annum
• 4,500 births per annum

The Project

• Deployment of Quadramed’s Computerised Patient Records (CPR) system (previously from Misys)
• Replacement of paper records with Electronic Patient Records (EPR)
• Migration to Quadramed on 2 sites with old, legacy PAS systems
• Deployment of Mobile, wireless printing at the bedside for specimen labelling
• Budget £1.6m (Project spend)

Challeges Faced

Lancashire TH NHS Trust had a requirement to replace their paper records with Electronic Patient Records (EPR). The trust had the additional challenge of merging 2 legacy Patient Administration Systems (PAS) in need of re-procurement.

Initial issues included the misreading of barcodes on the specimen labels for the Analysers in the Pathology laboratories, labels that had a very indifferent scanning success rate. This proved to be very troublesome for the Pathology labs and was extremely time consuming.

Additionally, with their printed wristband solution, the Trust were encountering problems with the reliability of scanning neo-natal and child wristbands, it was identified there were issues reading the barcodes on the bands when they were placed around a patients wrist, largely due to the curvature of the band. There was also the need to re-configure the Quadramed system to change the printer output, this was proving extremely time consuming and drained a lot of IM&T resource typically dedicated to Business as Usual issues.

Lancashire TH NHS Trust also wanted to incorporate a mobile, wireless printing solution at the bedside using Zebra QL+ mobile printers connected to their existing Cisco wireless network and hosted on a mobile cart provided by RDP Health.

How Dakota IS & Zebra helped

Dakota IS quickly identified that the reading of barcodes and their scannability was the core issue for the trust – it wasn’t happening for them. After some initial investigations Dakota IS identified the label face stock being used was inappropriate for the application with it being uncoated, therefore, it was less durable when printed via the Zebra Thermal Printers and susceptible to a small amount of “bleed”. They proposed a matched Zebra solution using Zebra coated direct thermal media to aid scanning with the Trusts barcodes. Within a short space of time the reading issues the Pathology labs had with their barcodes on the specimen labels disappeared.

Of equal importance was the resolution of the scanning issue & reading of the 1D barcodes on both the children & neo-natal printed wristbands. This was causing staff considerable extra work & they were losing faith in the newly implemented printed wristband solution.

Dakota IS, in liaison with Zebra Technologies, proposed converting the barcode on the wristbands from a linear 1D Code39 symbology to a more compact 2D Datamatrix barcode. Dakota IS wrote a program to take the standard 1D Code39 data & convert this into a 2D Datamatrix barcode once the wristband was printed on the ward. This would aid scanning at the bedside as there were two x 2D barcodes applied to each band, one at each end of the human readable text meaning that the barcodes were much easier to access & therefore scan.

This did present a further obstacle as the previous scanners deployed only had the ability to read 1D barcodes, therefore, Dakota IS proposed the new Honeywell Healthcare Imagers complete with anti-microbial, wipe down plastics that could read both 1D & 2D barcode symbologies. This enhanced plastic coating meant the imagers could be periodically wiped down with special fluids as part of the Trusts cleaning regime to negate the possibility of cross-infection in the hospital.

Keith Hardy, Managing Director at Dakota IS commented:

“We’ve been involved every step of the way once we identified the Trust had a problem. They were open minded on the resolutions we proposed to solve these issues & we quickly developed an excellent relationship and understanding with Peter and his team. Our job as integrator also embraces a “trusted advisor” role, once the Project Team realised we were skilled & adept in the technology they were looking to deploy we were simply tasked with bringing all disciplines together and making things work. This has proved to be a very challenging but enjoyable project.”