ICE Desktop meets demand for secondary care setting order communications interoperability.

Following a short development alliance between Anglia’s interoperability specialists and Ascribe personnel, the Company is pleased to announce that its ICE Desktop application can now present a dynamic order communications screen interface to Symphony, Ascribe’s Emergency Care IT system.

This upgrade to the respective ICE and Symphony systems has been achieved at West Middlesex Hospital, having gone live Friday 30th May and to schedule.

The interoperability development uses a SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) web service to enable the Symphony user to call up the ICE Desktop order screens to place requests for blood tests electronically. Symphony sends both the users identification and patients’ hospital number to ICE to facilitate a rapid and secure electronic transaction. After recording the orders in ICE the user is returned to the Symphony desktop to continue with the selected patient.

There is an emerging trend to use ICE Desktop in this way in secondary care settings and this work with Ascribe represents a pioneering example, presenting the Symphony user with a number of benefits such as reducing data entry duplicates and improving the management of data integrity to provide more reliable reporting services. Given that a third party system can present web services ICE has the potential to interoperate with numerous hospital based applications much as it has already done so with the majority of primary care GP practice system suppliers. Individuals interested in learning more of this approach should contact Anglia’s Norwich office: sales@ahsl.com

Industry acknowledgement

Symphony is Ascribe's Emergency Care solution and is used by Emergency Departments and Minor Injuries Units, it is a PC-based Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system designed to improve patient healthcare by providing clinicians and clerical staff with a comprehensive information access & retrieval IT solution. The system can operate either on a stand-alone basis or it can be integrated into existing computer systems. Symphony allows departments to monitor patient's progress, allocate resources and track performance targets.

About ICE Desktop

ICE Desktop is Anglia’s web browser application for clinical requesting, reporting and general ordering of provider services for use in hospital settings and primary care practices. It has become widely available to NHS organisations frequently as a stand-alone system but increasingly sought to combine with existing clinical systems and resources beyond the usual Pathology and Radiology remits.