Press Room

Salford Royal implements InterSystems Ensemble to modernise its IT integration capability 

- Enabling the Trust to rapidly consolidate 30 interfaces across a dozen systems and adopt the new ITK standards -

Eton, UK – 28th February 2011 – InterSystems today announced that the Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust has implemented InterSystems Ensemble^®. The Trust wanted to significantly upgrade its software integration architecture and so selected Ensemble, a seamless platform for integration and the development of connectable applications.  This enabled the Trust to rapidly consolidate and update 30 separate interfaces across a dozen systems, including its Patient Administration System and Electronic Patient Record applications.  Ensemble also provides the Trust with comprehensive support for the NHS Interoperability ToolKit (ITK) to support the Governments’ ‘Connect All’ healthcare IT strategy.

Salford Royal had previously used the legacy integration messaging engine SeeBeyond DataGate™, but this was considered limited in its flexibility to support integration with their new systems and servers.  The problems were further compounded by the absence of a test and back-up configuration management option.  This meant that  the new interfaces could not be properly tested prior to going ‘live’ which constituted a risk to the quality and continuity of their care services.

The Trust chose Ensemble owing to its ease of use, flexibility, and ability to support a wide variety of integration interface types - not just HL7.  Also, web browser-based real-time dashboards will assist the Trust in identifying any problem interfaces before users experience related issues.  The application, appliance, and device connectivity and interoperability that Ensemble provides will help the Trust optimise the sharing of patient and management information between all departments.  This will help manage costs and improve the quality of their data and care services by reducing duplicate activities and providing improved coordination between care teams who may each be using different departmental applications.

Ensemble was installed and productive in less than half a day, and the Trust is on schedule to complete its full implementation within six months.  During this time Ensemble will be configured to provide the Trust with a configuration management environment to support its quality management process across three environments: live, back-up and test.  To increase the speed of implementation InterSystems provided a comprehensive skills transfer training programme.  This means that from now on the Trust’s in-house IT team can configure new interface messages into a wide variety of formats without the need of 3rd party services.

Philip Bell, Head of Development at the Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, said, “The fact that Ensemble is the CSC TIE (Trust Integration Engine) was a big factor in our decision, and we were greatly reassured by our visit to a local Trust, where it has also been successfully deployed.  In the future we will look to employ more ITK compliant interfaces and the deployment of Ensemble is the first step in this modernisation process.  The InterSystems team demonstrated a tremendous understanding of our needs throughout the procurement process.  ”

Jonathan Selby, Country Manager, InterSystems said, “We are delighted that we were able to help Salford Royal to modernise their in-house IT integration services using InterSystems Ensemble.  With their new extensible capability for interoperability and information sharing, they can now maintain the efficacy and quality of their healthcare services, while being free to choose the healthcare applications that best meet their needs.”