Partnering across the East of England

For more than 10 years ReStart has been working with NHS trusts in the East of England, including The Queen Elizabeth Hospital King’s Lynn NHS Foundation Trust, James Paget University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, East & North Hertfordshire NHS Trust, Norfolk & Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust with specialist migration work to support the implementation of integration engines from third party suppliers.

Integration to support personalised care at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (NNUH)

As part of the NHS Elective Recovery Programme, ReStart supported Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (NNUH) with the delivery of Patient-Initiated Follow-ups (PIFU). ReStart’s technical expertise was selected to support the NNUH in-house team with specialist integration work with Infinity Health and DrDoctor.

The approach aligned with patients having greater participation in their care and engaging in shared decision-making with clinicians. The integration of PIFU interfaces at NNUH went live in 2022, ahead of schedule. Currently 20,000 patients have access to the hospital’s patient engagement portal, which accounts for approximately 11% of follow-up waiting lists for PIFU. Adopting a collaborative approach enabled patients to manage appointments and communicate with their care provider, supporting the prevention of health condition development and, in turn, optimising clinician time to enhance elective care recovery. This achievement translates into enhanced outcomes, increased patient satisfaction and a significant reduction in Did Not Attends (DNAs).

A single source of patient information for Norfolk and Waveney ICB

In 2023 Norfolk and Waveney ICB selected ReStart to provide interoperability expertise for the first two phases of their Shared Care Record (ShCR) deployment. Integrating mental health data from Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT), followed by the sharing of patient data from three acute trusts, James Paget University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (JPUH), The Queen Elizabeth Hospital Kings Lynn NHS Trust (QEH) and Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (NNUH). This latter stage also included the provision of documents from urgent care provider IC24 (Integrated Care 24), to the new Shared Care Record.

Stacey Cairns, Digital Project Manager, Norfolk and Waveney ICB explains:

“With ReStart’s existing acute relationships, they were able to quickly get the integrations in place and support the flow of information for us. ReStart has saved the day for us on more than a few occasions.”

As part of the solution, ReStart helped each trust to prepare multiple backloads of historic data types (patient demographics, Discharge Summaries, ePrescribing etc) to populate the Shared Care Record at launch. This involved careful manipulation of the data flows to ensure the integrity of the patient journey within each healthcare setting was maintained, bringing messages in sync with real-time events. Over 10 million messages were successfully extracted from the individual trusts, queued in a central integration engine (CIE), before releasing securely to the Shared Care Record.

All of this was made possible by ReStart’s longstanding partnerships with the care providers as well as InterSystems, the supplier of the ShCR solution. Stacey further comments: “ReStart give us assurance about our data, making sure it is accurately labelled and available for InterSystems so they can display it correctly. They take their time with our partner organisations, during daily and sometimes nightly meetings.”

The interoperability is supported 24/7 with ReStart monitoring all clinical interactions across the individual integration engines in each care setting as well as supporting the CIE. Through proactive monitoring of heartbeats, message queues and more, ReStart maintains the ongoing health and performance of every organisation.

Interoperability and shared data for combined Trust

In April 2020 the new Bedfordshire NHS Foundation Trust was formed following the merger of Bedford Hospital NHS Trust and the Luton and Dunstable University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. The combined Trust services include A&E, Obstetrics-led Maternity and Paediatrics.

Core to the Trust’s digital transformation was a single source of real-time information to support both clinical and administrative roles. Following a long-standing partnership with Bedfordshire hospital, the combined Trust continued to work with ReStart to replace limited point-to-point integrations between systems with HealthShare Health Connect, trust integration engine (TIE). The TIE was expanded to include radiology, cardiology and pathology reports, as well as bi-directional interfaces between PAS for both ED and maternity wards. More recently, clinical documents and cancer data have been added. Over 40 systems are now integrated through the Bedford TIE.

The Trust has also added ReStart’s interoperable clinical record to provide staff across the Trust with rapid access to patient information.  The clinical record architecture is inherently scalable – with no need for an expensive or time-consuming data repository development, information is simply pulled on demand from various systems. This has enabled Bedford Hospital to add new systems rapidly to the clinical record and scale up to deliver a greater depth of patient information throughout the Trust. Using the single-sign-on staff have access to up-to-date patient information throughout the Trust – from test results to medication, outpatient appointments to consultant letters.

According to Dean Pates, IT Systems Integration Manager at the Trust, “We are already sharing our pathology results from our TIE with East & North Hertfordshire NHS Trust and we are currently in discussion with some neighbouring organisations about data sharing to overcome cross-county border limitations to enable better shared service delivery.”

ReStart deliver integration and data migration projects for health and care; supporting a number of systems including Rhapsody, Ensemble and Health Connect integration engines. They have vast experience in developing data interfaces for systems such as Cerner, Lorenzo, McKesson, IPM, Epic, CaMIS and System C.  ReStart has worked with 49% of NHS Trusts, providing 24/7 integration support to 20% of Trusts and currently working in over 50% of ICS’s. ReStart’s solutions connect healthcare leaders to support patient care across all regions.

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