Move IT on up
Significant progress on CLCH IT investment strategy
The pace of modern life, and the technological advancements that support it have never been greater. A fact that is borne out here at CLCH as a year after the implementation of our £21.38m, five-year IT strategy began, we can reflect on a number of key achievements.
- Embarked upon implementing an integrated system that allows key GP data to be viewed by clinicians and therefore enhancing the patient experience.
- Electronic automation (60% complete) of the child health system that allows our services to receive information from our colleagues in acute hospital settings in real time.
- Development of mobile working across our clinical teams continues. We have issued 165 smart devices to physiotherapists, speech therapists, health visitors, community nurses and occupational therapists.
- Introduction of video conferencing and virtual meeting rooms.
- Migrated servers and data storage space to a specialist secure data centre making our network more reliable, more efficient and thus minimising disruption to clinical activity.
- Improved bandwidth and introduced more reliable wi-fi networks to a number of our sites.
- Staff now have access to diary, email and ordering through the internet on the move.
- Introduced more robust electronic document management system.
Ian Millar, director of finance, performance and corporate resources says:
"The IT strategy is a five year plan and so there is of course much more in the pipeline, however we are very pleased and proud of what we have done in the first 12 months. We are going through a number of changes across the Trust at the moment but our increasing use of technology allows us to continually develop and improve the way we deliver services to patients.
"It's vital that the NHS moves with the times and developments in technology are extremely advantageous for our clinicians, who see so many of our patients out in the community, often in their own homes. We have to ensure that all our record keeping of patient information is secure but also the way in which we capture it is agile and modern to ensure our patients receive the best possible NHS care".
For more information about our IT developments please contact sarah.wilkins@clch.nhs.uk