A group of London hospitals has signed up to use a shared laboratory information management system (LIMS) from CliniSys to support their pathology network.
South West London Pathology is working with the company to prepare to deploy its WinPath Enterprise software to replace the legacy systems.
The network – which consists of St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Croydon Health Services NHS Trust and Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust – provides an integrated pathology service for more than 2 million people in its area.
It has been operating on a ‘hub and spoke’ model, with a main hub laboratory at St George’s Hospital and spoke sites at Croydon and Kingston to manage urgent local work. They have used a number of systems including iLab APEX LIMS at St George’s and older versions of WinPath at Kingston and Croydon.
The new deployment should enable all the network’s sites to use a single database, with better reporting and analytics tools.
Its implementation will be phased, with the aim of the first service going live by the end of 2019 and all sites and services following within 18 months.
Sustainability factor
Simon Brewer, managing director of South West London Pathology, said: “We have a 25-year-old LIMS that was never designed to support a network, and we have created so many workarounds that it is no longer sustainable.
“We need a LIMS that can do a lot more; one that will enable us to further harmonise our workflow and enable us to grow.”
The new LIMS will have to be integrated with the electronic patient record systems used by the different partner trusts; and the seven order communications systems used to order different tests from across the network. This will make use of the Rhapsody integration engine, developed by Orion Health, layered into the CliniSys solution and delivered as part of the contract.
Image from CliniSys
