Frectally speaking

Leeds, England is the home of both the NHS National Programme for IT and Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.

Leeds Teaching Hospitals is one of the largest trusts in England, with over 14,000 staff over 4 sites and is where I practice as an Emergency Physician.  I’ve been pleased to have a role as Clinical Lead for Informatics here in the last 2 years, where we have a clinically led Informatics Strategy.

At the heart of  that strategy we have agreed a clinical portal and integration approach building a care record in a move away from data siloes and centred around the patient. Interestingly we began to tackle our clinical portal requirement as a joint open source effort between ourselves at Leeds TH and a commercial partner (Restart Consulting).

I’m pleased that we have had a useful first phase of the project, having now been tested in a live environment it has proven clinically useful. In the spirit of “release early, release often” we have now put the code into the open.

So I’d like to acknowledge my NHS colleagues who have helped progress this effort to this point, the technical team behind it and hope it proves useful to others outside Leeds. Which is why we have also agreed to collaborate with the University of Leeds in supporting the early NHS based  eHealthOpenSource.org.

Am attaching a set of open portal related slides (inc. screenshots) here fyi..

BTW In case you might think this looks like an unusual open source approach to clinical information systems development, integration of legacy and moves towards an open, modular, standards based, service oriented architecture have a look back at last months story from the VA/DOD in the US.. If you look under the hood you will see much overlap in thinking behind these moves..

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Note Added:  Nov 2014

As an update to this post, the Leeds Clinical Portal has continued to progress and thrive. Now aligned with another key system grown in Leeds (Patient Pathway Manager aka PPM) , the latest version of the platform is called Leeds PPM+ platform and powers both the Leeds TH EPR and the Leeds Care Record. An updated presentation on these is available here.