CfH to pilot clinical dashboards

NHS Connecting for Health has awarded a contract to System C to design, develop and pilot Clinical Intelligence Systems, or clinical dashboards, over the next nine months.

Under a £3.2m framework contract, System C will develop and implement the Clinical Intelligence Systems in over a dozen NHS trusts, across all ten English Strategic Health Authorities.

E-Health Insider understands the clinical dashboards will involve developing feeds from potentially dozens of different clinical IT systems that will then feed into personalisable dashboards.  The project is expected to make use of Common User Interface design concepts developed by Microsoft and NHS Connecting for Health. 

The concept of clinical dashboards was highlighted in the final report of Lord Darzi’s Next Stage Review of the NHS, published last June. This emphasisied the critical need to use and act on quality measures.

The review said every provider of NHS services urgently needed tools to systematically measure, analyse and improve quality.

The part-time health minister and surgeon said this data should be displayed to staff through ‘clinical dashboards’ to measure their performance and use the information to make continuous improvements.

Ian Denley, the chief executive of System C, told E-Health Insider: “All the trusts who are to participate in the Clinical Intelligence Systems pilot have been identified, with work on the project already underway.”

As part of the deal System C will also supply training and knowledge transfer to local NHS organisations.

This will be focused on building in-house development capability to change and enhance the new Clinical Intelligence Systems, including the ability to extend the tools to support other clinical specialties, services and practices.

The contract was awarded to System C following an Additional Supply Capability and Capacity (ASCC) procurement carried out last year.