Avoca Systems Ltd, Case Studies

Barnet & Chase Farm NHS Trust

The most recent data migration project for Avoca is the NPfIT implementation of Cerner Millennium at Barnet & Chase Farm NHS Trust, working with Perot Systems and BT. The project involves cleaning and transformation of data from two large legacy Hospital PAS. The Hospital Trust’s 800 staff will be using the Avoca Historic Data Repository to access the non-migrated data from the legacy systems once they are decommissioned.

Queen Mary’s Sidcup NHS Trust

Avoca were contracted by BT to provide data migration, identity management and archiving services for their first NPfIT PAS deployment into the IDX Carecast solution. BT recognised that specific domain expertise was required for the migration, identity management and archiving of data and commissioned Avoca to provide that expertise. The project went live in November 2005 and is considered a significant achievement given the high profile go-live date and the consequential pressure that BT and Avoca were placed under.

Weston Area Health NHS Trust

Avoca were contracted by Fujitsu to provide data migration and identity management services. This was the first Fujitsu/Avoca data migration and also the first Trust in the Southern Cluster to successfully migrate waiting list data. As part of the implementation historic patient data was migrated with data relating to all patients seen in the last three years, all outpatients with pending appointments, and those on current in-patient waiting lists.

Winchester and Eastleigh Healthcare NHS Trust

Avoca were contracted by Fujitsu to provide data migration and identity management services. From receipt of data, Avoca made the upload file to the target system available for the first trial load in 12 weeks. The time taken from receipt of the initial data extract to readiness to go live was 9 months with over 400,000 Master Patient Index (MPI) records migrated.

Milton Keynes Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

Avoca were contracted by Fujitsu to provide data migration and identity management services. De-duplication was done in 2 waves, firstly by removing internal duplicates and then interactive de-duplication against the domain using Avoca’s Intra Domain De-duping Tool (IDDT). Data migration from the old PAS to the target system was reported by the Trust to have "gone smoothly" affirmed by the solution going live across the 460-bed acute hospital and community sites.

Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust

Avoca were contracted by Fujitsu to provide data extraction, migration and identity management services. Avoca worked closely with the Surrey Health Informatics Service to ensure a successful outcome which included 200,000 records being de-duplicated from the source data before upload into Cerner’s Millennium solution.

After several years of winning and delivering analysis and reporting projects at a local Trust and Health Authority level, Avoca were commissioned by the Department of Health to provide a national online analysis service to the entire NHS called the Online System for Comparative Analysis and Reporting (OSCAR). This service, the largest ever, was managed entirely by Avoca as a sub contractor to McKesson. Running successfully for two years up to the start of NPfIT, it had over 2000 users from Acute Trusts, Primary Care Trusts and Health Authorities delivering a range of web based reports on commissioning and performance analysis.

For this ground breaking project, Avoca handled 86 million inpatient, day case and outpatient records received from every hospital trust in England and provided a range of standardization, cleansing and derivation routines to make approx 128 million corrections / amendments to the data each quarter

In 2006, the success of Avoca’s identity management solution at a local level, led to Fujitsu and the NHS to commission Avoca to deliver a centrally managed service for intra domain de-duping. The challenge comes about because multiple hospitals within the same geographical area migrate their patient data into a single centralised system. As such, it is essential for the patient records that are common to 2 or more hospitals to be identified and merged, to create a single instance of the patient record. Failure to achieve this identification and merge results on the central system can lead to serious patient safety issues. Avoca provide the Identity Management solution to this problem. Implemented in 2006, the solution is used by organisations in the Southern Cluster migrating to Cerner’s Millennium system. The identity management software is hosted centrally at the Fujitsu data centre, with Avoca providing a managed service. The service involves Avoca uploading the Trust’s migrating Patient Master Index data together with the snapshot of the PMI from the target system (Millennium from Cerner) and executing the software. In addition, Avoca provide training; support; software maintenance; quality assurance and ad-hoc consultancy to Fujitsu and the end user NHS Trust.

The success of this service, known to Fujitsu as the Intra Domain De-duping Tool (IDDT) has led CFH to commission extensions in order to address the challenge of a split hospital trust migration. Avoca’s identity management solution resolves the patient numbering and case note tracking problem that staggering the trust migration into central master patient index creates.