Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals Link Departmental Systems Using InterSystems Web Technology

Key Benefits

• High Performance
• Web Connectivity

The Oxford Radcliffe Hospital NHS Trust is both the local hospital for the people of Oxfordshire as well as providing specialized services to a wider population. It is also one of the country's largest teaching hospitals and is a major medical research centre with close links to the Clinical School of Oxford University and Oxford Brookes University. The laboratories at the John Radcliffe provide a wide range of services including haematology, biochemistry, cellular pathology and microbiology, together handling more than 1.4 million specimens and test results each year.

The hospital provides laboratory services to the entire Oxford Radcliffe Hospital NHS Trust as well as to all other Oxford hospitals and regional GPs. That's a lot of people depending on a lot of laboratory data each year. Like most large organizations, the John Radcliffe Hospital was faced with the common problem of shared data access. How could it possibly enable all the disparate hospital departments to access their relevant test results at a minute's notice, as well as providing links between all the various departments, and still provide data security and protection? This question alone might seem challenging enough, but it's further complicated for the hospital staff when all the departments have different systems but only a small IT budget with which to work.

In March 1997 the service provided by the John Radcliffe laboratories was dramatically increased to cover the whole Oxford Radcliffe NHS Trust, resulting in an immediate need for hospital departments to browse, view, and search data held on the laboratory computer system. At that time, direct access between existing departmental systems was impossible as David Nurse, IT manager for laboratory medicine at the John Radcliffe Hospital, explains, "It just wasn't possible to link our existing system to the other departments due to the incompatibility of the various desktop architectures already in use throughout the hospitals. Also our server was running at near capacity already, so numerous additional logon names and passwords could not be accommodated without seriously compromising performance of the system."

"Like most hospitals, we operate on a pretty tight budget, and cannot afford to update all of our hardware and software at once in all the departments to achieve total systems compatibility."

- David Nurse
IT Manager
John Radcliffe Hospital

The hospital has found the answer in the form of new technology from InterSystems. Using InterSystems' Caché Web tehcnology, the John Radcliffe Hospital is now able to provide its numerous hospital departments with access to over 390,000 test results each year. The previously incompatible departmental systems are linked together by Caché's Web browser application, which was specifically developed to enable medical staff throughout the hospital to have immediate access to clinical data and laboratory test results, while still protecting the integrity and security of the data against unauthorized access.

"We found the solution by using InterSystems technology to develop a warehouse of the all the data, and developing a Web application using Caché to allow users in remote departments to browse, view, and search the data. This has been running live for a few months now, and currently the database is growing by 1,000 to 1,500 records a day without any problem. And as a result of this success with the Caché Web application we are also now using it to link in the whole pathology system. This is due to go live any day now, which will enable an estimated 2,000 remote logins daily. Within six to eight weeks this will be the primary interface for all pathology systems throughout the NHS Trust."

Caché Web technology is the high-performance alternative to traditional, slow programming for the World Wide Web, enabling fast data connections between databases and browser-based applications. Many Web sites use a generic facility called the Common Gateway Interface(CGI). But this is notoriously slow. Caché Web technologyovercomes this problem through the use of something called TCP Sockets, which provides connections for extremely high-performance, throughput and security. By providing a high-performance linkage between the Web and the hospital's databases, data is accessible to users anywhere and anytime.

Nurse continues, "One of the main benefits we found with Caché Web technologyis its ability to integrate data from other systems, enabling true integration of bespoke systems of all types. Like most hospitals, we operate on a pretty tight budget, and cannot afford to update all of our hardware and software at once in all the departments to achieve total systems compatibility. Using Caché Web technology, compatibility is no longer a major problem as we are able to easily integrate all of our various systems together. We have also been very impressed with the level of support we have received for the product, which has been excellent."