Black Country Pathology Services has taken a ‘big bang‘ approach to upgrade the laboratory information system and order communications and results reporting at its Dudley Lab.
The service has built a pathology hub in Wolverhampton and developed four essential services laboratories at The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust, Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust, Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust, and The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust.
As part of year-long planning for its go-live, Dudley implemented WinPath Enterprise and went-live with the Clinisys Integrated Clinical Environment, at the same time. Before the go-live, the service in Dudley was using a legacy laboratory information system from Clinisys and an order communications and results reporting system which “didn’t support both pathology and radiology”.
Nick Fudger, head of pathology and IT transformation, Black Country Pathology Services: “We are really proud of the way that we all worked together to make this happen. This was the biggest go-live to date, because the ICE implementation made a ‘big bang’ the only option.”
The service noted that its previous laboratory information system was closely integrated with ICE, with results going into the electronic patient record used by The Dudley Group and other key IT systems, including those used for sepsis alerting and infection control.
Nick continued: “We had to make sure that hospital requesters and GPs would see minimum disruption in service, and that results were being delivered to every system that needed them. It was a big job, but it went very well. We’re already into business as usual and looking forward to the next set-of go-lives, as more services at other labs move over.”
