Our sister consultancy, Aire Logic, began working with Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust to accelerate development on their in-house EHR. Initially, the trust requirement was for a forms engine to allow their clinical teams to quickly and consistently build data capture forms. The forms were largely patient-centric, and represented the trust’s strategy in moving away from paper processes, and also away from their own in-house developed forms engine.

The Trust has a mature in-house development team who continue to develop and maintain their in-house EHR, Minestrone, and a linked Bedview system to give a trust wide view of live patient information to improve decision making and patient safety.

Solution

We worked alongside PHU’s in-house development team to successfully integrate our low code AireForms forms engine into Minestrone during the early stages of the covid19 pandemic - this defined new ways- of-working, focusing on remote collaboration and ensuring effective communication between the teams. The software was installed on-prem as a joint effort between Aire Logic, Portsmouth internal teams and a third party managed services provider. Following on from the successful implementation, we were then asked to provide a solution for their interdepartmental referral (IDR) processes, which were currently lacking in structure and were partially manual. This project saw PHU taking our low-code workflow engine, AireFlow, as an early release development partnership, requiring the development teams to work together collaboratively as one team in enhancing and defining the initial clinical use-cases and product roadmap. IDR was able to extend on patterns already established, primarily the use of AireForms as the data capture component for completion of referral forms.

In parallel to the IDR project, we were also asked to provide a solution for preoperative assessment (POA) and digital patient consent, a scenario that was becoming increasingly important for the trust to solidify. This particular project saw a change in the way the teams worked together, extending on our existing software vendor relationship (with professional services) to also introduce collaborative development efforts on PHU’s proprietary applications. Alongside our product delivery PHU procured a budget of professional services for a team of technical staff to work directly on Minestrone. This will allow our team to be hands-on in the systems integration, whilst working with the in-house team to ensure the right approaches are being taken. This particular project has a tight delivery deadline due to funding so all key milestones had to be estimated accurately, with suitable early releases (MVP) to ensure a successful go live.

Results

To date PHU has successfully delivered 20 clinical digital forms forms to production since June 2021, with over 140,000 forms submissions a month and growing all the time. The solution is used organisation-wide by clinicians and patient facing solutions are planned in March for POA and eConsent.

We will also be going live with the MVPs for POA and IDR and more and more clinical forms are being developed for Minestrone and Bedview.

Our relationship with Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust has evolved from software vendor to a trusted development partner working seamlessly as one team across both organisations applications.