Hospital boosts safety with single sign-on software

Great Ormond Street Hospital is piloting new software that will speed up access to patient information, ensure patients receive the correct treatments and improve hospital governance.

The system provides single sign-on access for authorised medical staff to various clinical applications such as ward lists and patient medication records.

The software ensures that when doctors or nurses select a patient in the system, all the information shown is relevant only to that patient. This reduces the risk of data such as medication records being confused and patients being given the wrong dosage or prescription.

David Bowen, electronic patient record programme manager, told silicon.com: "Guaranteed consistency means that mistakes are less like to happen."

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The system also allows clinicians to switch between data about different patients much more quickly than the previous system. And it helps to improve governance by producing a simple audit trail.

At the same time, the learning curve on the new software shouldn't be too steep for hospital staff as they will be using "familiar applications that people have always used", Bowen said.

The hospital plans to bring in more applications that can work with the system such as the proposed NHS smart card scheme.

The trial of the system, which was developed by medical software company Sentillion, is due to start in the New Year with a full roll-out planned by the end of March 2007.