Patient Administration Systems – can gradual evolution support the revolutionary clinical practices of the future?

In the bigger picture of hospital IT, Patient Administration Systems (PAS) are often taken for granted. Whilst they’re not used at the point of patient care, they are relied on every minute of every day. Their power lies in their ability to link and integrate, working behind the scenes to support some of the more visible systems, such as digital patient health records, electronic medicines management and test ordering. At Leeds, the PAS links in with more than fifty other systems, supporting patients throughout their hospital journey, connecting the dots and automatically updating key information in lots of different places simultaneously.

?There’s further investment and development on the horizon for the PAS at Leeds, and Karen Mitchell, Programme Lead, explains more about the Trust’s journey and ambitions for the future.

?Why is PAS so important to the Trust?

?PAS is fundamental to everything the Trust does, probably in ways many people don’t even realise. When a patient attends one of our hospitals, the first thing we need is their name, address, next of kin, NHS number and so on. Our teams use this information on PAS to link through to other systems so we can access information about current conditions, allergies, previous treatment and so on. Every patient journey starts with PAS – it’s our master file.

?What have we done so far?

?We’ve already completed a huge amount of work to modernise and stabilise PAS. Both the hardware and software were upgraded last year, and this has given us a great foundation to build on. ?We’ve already released two sets of enhancements, and the features in our latest release will support the work of our Safeguarding teams across the Trust, and also support measurement of the Trust’s operational transformation strategy, providing an effective way to measure some of the reasons why patients miss appointments and insight to support improvements or changes as a result.

?It’s vital that PAS holds accurate data and can integrate effectively with any other system that requires master demographic data. This sounds simple taken at face value, but the detail behind this is incredibly complex. We’re doing a lot of work to ensure the quality and accuracy of this data – it comes from many different sources so getting the processes and governance behind this right is essential. In the longer term, a crucial part of our integration plan involves working with systems outside of the Trust such as NHS Spine, a nationally managed service, which will connect us with thousands of healthcare systems and organisations across England.

?How can we prepare to support the revolutionary clinical practices of the future?

Our PAS is designed and built by Dedalus, and this partnership is critical to the way we develop PAS to support our needs and requirements in the future. Dedalus is a truly global organisation, and they bring a great wealth of experience from working with their various partners around the world, not to mention the obvious financial backing that comes with being such a well-established and respected company. It’s extremely reassuring to be working with an organisation like Dedalus - they not only have the knowledge and expertise to devise the solutions we need but also the capacity to ensure that those solutions are delivered.

?Dedalus view us as a leading partner and, like us, they have their eye on the future. Alongside other Trusts, we’ve been actively working with Dedalus to co-create our future PAS roadmap. Whatever this looks like, we’re both committed to ensuring that it is created to meet the needs of the NHS long term plan, and our partnership gives me great confidence for the future success of the Programme.

?What does this future roadmap look like?

We’ve got lots of ideas and suggestions for future functionality. These all need to be impact assessed but there’s a huge amount of value to be had in supporting the continuing development of PAS. One area where I think PAS can add real value is in supporting effective patient communication. The LGBT+ community is a great example of this – by introducing sexual orientation and gender identity recording into a well-integrated PAS system, we will be able to provide a more tailored and appropriate experience and healthcare along the entire patient pathway. In this way, PAS is supporting us to treat patients individually with the care they deserve.

Beyond that, there are other exciting but more long-term plans such as the move to a cloud-based PAS solution. It’s truly exciting that we have already laid much of the necessary groundwork which allows us to move to a stage where we can seriously consider all the revolutionary possibilities open to us.

Karen has leadership responsibility for Leeds Teaching Hospitals’ PAS development programme. Karen joined the NHS in 2021, bringing over 25 years’ global leadership experience in sales and procurement from many different industries. Karen Mitchell