“The problem of identifying potential duplicate patients before they are loaded to a live domain was a big problem for the Programme. Avoca used their expertise and tools to architect a solution and helped us get CfH/NHS approval."  John Pope, Project Manager.

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 of identifying potential duplicate records 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 two 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.