Mastering Data Management

Knowing and leveraging relationships among patient data can improve care.

General Healthcare Group is the leading provider of independent healthcare services in the UK. They manage BMI Healthcare, the largest acute care hospital network with 60 facilities encompassing more than 2,200 beds across England, Scotland and Wales. BMI serves 300,000 patients, with over one million patient records.

BMI’s challenge was uniting their patient information systems, which existed as standalone silos in each of the 60 hospitals. Replacing all the systems across the network would be too costly. BMI needed to find a way to enable better interoperability among their existing systems.

BMI selected a client registry to link records across the facilities to enable a comprehensive view for each patient. The implementation team averaged more than three sites per month, reaching the entire hospital network within 18 months. The initiative improved both the availability and quality of patient information across patients, clinicians, administrators and management.

The solution is helping General Healthcare Group run BMI’s business better, with several results:

• Achieve an accurate, single view of the patient
• Enable groundbreaking forms of customer service
• Help increase their internal efficiencies

BMI now has a strategic systems framework that enables business agility, minimized disruption and retraining, and facilitates more flexibility in procuring future systems. Finally, Initiate enabled BMI’s systems to be compatible with National Health Service (NHS) and international standards to achieve interoperability, provide expandability and comply with NHS requirements.

As a result of the consortium’s efforts, the healthcare network experienced improved demographic data analysis, provided a consolidated view of patients, delivered better purchasing and contract maintenance capabilities, and provided access to online appointments and easier rescheduling. In addition, networked insurers benefited from online billing, inquiry handling, verification and authorization.

Learn more about how General Healthcare Group and BMI built a consortium of industry leaders to enable interoperability.