The Christie NHS Foundation Trust has selected Aire Logic as a software engineering partner in a £1.6m agreement. The partnership will support modernisation of its Electronic Health Record (EHR) using the openEHR standard to ‘separate the data layer’, aligning with the NHS England Data saves lives strategy.

The Christie is the largest single site cancer centre in Europe, of which specialist UK-wide referrals account for 25% of patients, in addition to serving the Greater Manchester and Cheshire & Merseyside ICSs. The trust has adopted an openEHR platform approach to modernise its feature rich in-house EHR.

Following a robust procurement process, the trust selected Aire Logic to provide software engineering, devops and architecture expertise to deliver multiple aspects of the EHR programmes. Workstreams include integrating more data into Better’s low-code platform, expanding order communications functionality, and user interface improvements.

This new partnership will expand The Christie’s Engineering team which designs, builds, assures and supports the EHR platform. A multi-disciplinary approach sees digital teams working directly with medical, nursing and operational subject matter experts.

Aire Logic have a proven and successful track record of working in partnership withAcute NHS organisations as an EHR development partner, advising and influencing long term EHR roadmaps and delivering skilled teams to build large scale enterprise healthcare systems.

The Trust recently selected a low-code platform and openEHR data platform to provide a separate data layer for unifying cancer data into one place. The low-code environment is supporting the modernisation and pathway redesign of over 600 clinical forms. Longer term, the aspiration is to integrate additional vendors into the openEHR data layer.

Alistair Reid-Pearson, Interim ChiefInformation Officer at The Christie NHS FT commented:

“Modernisation of our EHR platform and unlocking the power of data using openEHR is a key part of the strategy to advance cancer research. This partnership will provide us with industry leading expertise to expand our talented in-house software engineering team.”

Mike Odling-Smee, Director at Aire Logic said:

“We are delighted to have been chosen to partner with The Christie on such an exciting digital transformation project, not only does it play to our strengths and expertise in EHR development but it gives us the opportunity to work on a programme that will deliver real-life benefits to clinicians and patients on cancer care pathways.”

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About The Christie

The Christie is the largest single site cancer centre in Europe. The Christie treats more than 60,000patients a year and was the first UK centre to be accredited as a comprehensive cancer centre. Specialist national referrals account for 25% of patients, in addition to serving the Greater Manchester and Cheshire & Merseyside ICSs.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/DigitalChristie  

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-christie-nhs-foundation-trust/

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