Information Services
Information Services provide Statutory, Routine and Adhoc reporting available across the Trust. This includes the ongoing development and maintenance of the Trust’s central data warehouse, associated reporting developments, data processing and cleansing services.
Their work will continue to move the Trust away from a reactive and retrospective reporting function to a pro-active and predictive modelling, analysis and intelligence service.
Information Services will provide an integrated approach to performance reporting and continue with the development of the Integrated Performance Report, NHS Outcomes Framework, On-line automated Dashboards.
Information Governance (IG)
Providing the Trust with appropriate advice and guidance on compliance with UK and EU legislation, NHS standards and best practice for Information Governance.
A comprehensive IG Risk and Issues Logs will be maintained and used to ensure compliance across all systems and processes. Day to day management of FOI and SAR requests, ensuring compliance with mandatory response times.
Health Records
Day to day management of the Trust’s medical records library, ensuring that clinical services have complete patient records at the time and place they are needed. As the Trust trials weekend clinics, the medical records service will need to respond to ensure continuity and support of those services.
The requirement to have robust case note tracking and document management will be addressed in the new Health Informatics Strategy.
Clinical Coding
Accurately coded episodes of care are pivotal in assessing clinical outcomes, safety of our working practices, quality and ensuring financial viability. It is essential that clinical coding occurs as near to real time as possible and as close to the point of care as possible. We will therefore continue with our plans to co-locate our Clinical Coders into the Wards and Clinics. This will have the added benefit of assisting in the process of embedding Service Line Reporting across clinical areas. We will also consolidate our expertise and knowledge by supporting our Clinical Coders in passing the national accreditation examination.
Clinical Coding will develop stronger links with Quality to further increase the clinical coding quality, income generation and reduce data quality queries.
Information Technology (IT)
Day-to-day management of a stable IT infrastructure, as well as constantly seeking and delivering improvements via upgrades and new technologies.
This team consists of three streams:
- IT Support – includes IT Service Desk, Desktop Support and Server maintenance
- Network and Systems (infrastructure)
- Applications Management (clinical systems) – includes Data Quality
Programme Management
Management and co-ordination of a portfolio of projects, some sourced from capital funding that have been identified in the Health Informatics Strategy, others sourced from departmental budgets.
The team focuses on both large Trust-wide projects as well as ensuring some smaller projects are also taken forward, with a view to ensuring on-going service improvement takes place at all levels. This team includes the provision of the following services:
- informatics project management (project leadership and support)
- change management (process mapping and design)
- IT training (PAS, other clinical systems, ad hoc requests)
Service Level Management
Maintain and improve service quality through a constant cycle of agreeing, monitoring and reporting on service achievements and the instigation of actions to eradicate poor service. Ensuring that Health Informatics complies with the Scheme of Delegation achieves financial balance and contributes towards the Trust’s CIPs targets.
