Worcestershire Health ICT Programme Goes Live with Orion Health Clinical Portal

Secure Information Sharing for the NHS in Worcestershire

London, 23rd November 2011 -Orion Health, a leading provider of healthcare integration and workflow technology announced today that the Worcestershire Acute NHS Trust has gone live with its Clinical Portal, promoting information sharing across Acute, Primary and Community Care to support better clinical care for Worcestershire residents. 

A joint initiative between clinicians and the Trust’s IT department, the clinical portal displays a real-time unified “single view” of interactions with patients across the region.  The Trusts “Connect All” strategy is designed to make all clinical information available to users across organisational boundaries through the clinical portal, in line with their role and access rights and irrespective of their location.

Information such as inpatient, outpatient and theatre lists, demographics, images, results, encounter history, medication, documents and letters is made available in the Orion Health Clinical Portal via the Orion Health Rhapsody Integration Engine. In total, information from over 29 different systems is integrated, including data from Oasis PAS, Bluespier, AGFA, ICE and PCTI.

“The Clinical Portal is a key milestone in our strategy to build an integrated Electronic Patient Record based on a ‘best-of-breed’ approach to clinical systems,” said John Thornbury, Director of ICT for Worcestershire Health. “The appropriate sharing of information across the region will allow clinicians – both in the hospital setting and in the community – to treat patients based on shared knowledge, rather than just treating the patients ‘as seen’.”

The “connect all” strategy means that clinicians can quickly gain a better understanding of a patient’s medical history, thereby reducing the possibility for medical errors and unnecessary duplication of effort & repeat ordering of tests. Online access to scanned documents will reduce time chasing case notes and other relevant information so that decisions can be made in a more timely, cost effective manner.

“One of the most impressive aspects of the Worcestershire Clinical Portal is that the Trust has completed much of the work on their own, showing that value-add technology solutions do not necessarily require a large & potentially expensive supplier programme team,” commented Colin Henderson, Managing Director Orion Health UK and Ireland.

“Worcester is a visionary organisation, enabling the exchange of information across care boundaries to reflect the reality of healthcare delivery by multi-disciplinary teams,” Colin Henderson continued. “The clinical portal is a key foundation of that journey – and many more Trusts are also seeing the value in this approach, using best of breed systems plus a clinical portal to address their ICT needs.”

The Clinical Portal development will also make a significant contribution to supporting the QIPP initiative by making information readily accessible to promote quality care, enabling alerts and triggers that support compliance with targets (e.g. alerts of recurring patient admissions) and saving time during patient encounters.

About Orion Health Ltd.

Orion Health’s easy-to-use solutions and applications improve patient care and clinical decision-making by providing integrated health data in a single, unified view. By enhancing existing healthcare information systems, the Orion Health Rhapsody™ Integration Engine, Clinical Portal and workflow solutions, provide healthcare workers with easy access to patient data and trends, and reduce errors and omissions by streamlining information transfer. 



Worldwide, Orion Health implements health information communities involving over 30 million patients with hundreds of thousands of active users including NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Spain’s IB Salut, New Zealand Ministry of Health, Maine’s HealthInfoNet, Lahey Clinic, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Alberta Health Services. Orion Health’s partners include leading health system integrators and IT vendors such as Accenture, Allscripts, IBM, Oracle, Philips and others.