NHS Nightingale Hospital Bristol has been set up with a laboratory link from CliniSys for clinicians to request patient tests and receive the results electronically.
The pathology systems specialist responded to a request from Severn Pathology – a partnership between North Bristol NHS Trust and Public Health England – to integrate Nightingale Bristol’s IT systems with those used by the labs at North Bristol NHS Trust.
The integration enables the CliniSys WinPath laboratory information system used by North Bristol to pick up requests for tests placed in the version of CliniSys ICE used by the Nightingale Bristol and return the results through the ICE system.
Bristol Nightingale is among the temporary hospitals set up specifically to deal with coronavirus patients.
Vital role
Pathology services manager David Gibbs said: “Diagnostics is vital to running an intensive care unit, so as preparations were made for the new facility, we knew that it would need to be linked up with the labs at North Bristol, which can run all of the tests required.
“Getting NHS IT systems to talk to each other can be notoriously difficult, but CliniSys developed a plan and executed it very quickly, working over the Easter holidays. We went from the seemingly impossible to having a slick solution in a matter of days.”
Severn Pathology has taken additional steps to support the coronavirus response, using NPEx, the national pathology network, to link the labs across the South West of England, so they can spread the load of Covid-19 testing.
It has also redeployed staff who are not carrying out tests to support routine work onto the Covid-19 effort. It will soon have the capacity to run 8,000-10,000 tests per day for NHS staff, frontline workers, and patients and has started testing every hospital patient for the virus, even if they are not showing symptoms, and every patient booked in for surgery.
Image from iStock, Berekin
