North West London ICS Frees Resources for Healthcare Delivery Innovation with InterSystems HealthShare Health Connect Cloud

When four distinct acute hospital trusts in the UK, Chelsea and Westminster, London North West, Imperial, and Hillingdon, decided to implement the same electronic health record (EHR), they also were in the process of combining to form a new organisation – North West London Integrated Care System (ICS).

As North West London ICS, the four trusts worked collaboratively with InterSystems to integrate a single instance of their new EHR with their internal service delivery systems, such as radiology and laboratory, and external information sources and destinations. But their vision for interoperability and efficient care delivery went higher and broader.

What if they could free themselves from running the integration platform, with its computing management overhead and risk? This would allow them to focus on delivering valuable innovations to their colleagues and patients and establish a platform that, in time, could serve additional health and care service providers across the ICS.

North West London ICS signed a five-year partnership with InterSystems to deliver a cloud-based interoperability service using its InterSystems HealthShare® Health Connect Cloud™ platform. This single integrated environment replaces the four integration platforms that the separate trusts ran previously.

Matthew Kybert, Deputy Chief Information Officer – System Solutions at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust says: “At North West London ICS, we are focused on making best use of technology to help and support the people we serve. I’m delighted to be working with InterSystems to advance on our shared goal of boosting healthcare interoperability to drive transformation and improve patient care.”

The migration onto the cloud is an incremental process, and the North West London team can draw on the technical expertise of InterSystems, with experts on call 24x7 as required.

With a new single EHR in place across the ICS, the 2.1 million citizens served by North West London ICS will benefit from the wider integration between social care, mental health trusts, community trusts, local authorities, and third sector organisations.

Care providers can access more up-to-date information about each patient and act on it faster, enabling them to identify people at risk of developing health problems; intervene earlier and offer more personalised care.

Cost reduction is another key benefit of the new approach. The cost of hardware and of upgrading and patching the environment is included in the service InterSystems provides, and running a single integration environment rather than four separate ones is inherently more cost-effective.

The new environment also enables a combined approach, with one team of developers working on specific concerns of the individual trusts, as well as collaborating where there is a common interest across all four. So, if the ICS needs an interface from its EHR solution to a radiology or scanning system, it has one team across all the trusts putting joint developments in place. The new technology has also allowed the ICS to move to the latest software development paradigm of continuous integration, continuous delivery (CICD), provided and managed by InterSystems.

North West London ICS anticipates that the new systems will support a streamlined cross-organisational flow of information and additional cost savings as all the major interfaces across the ICS are migrated into the cloud.

With technology playing such an important role in helping North West London ICS meet the diverse needs of the population it serves, this collaboration with InterSystems showcases the benefits of taking an integrated approach to health and care service delivery in terms of the technology and the teams that make it deliver value.