NHS signs nationwide £20m deal for ‘electronic infection control’ systems
The NHS has signed a £20m deal to enable health-service organisations to deploy technology to help better manage the spread of infections.
The contract – awarded to US-based healthcare giant Baxter – is intended to offer NHS trusts a means through which they can buy a comprehensive infection-control platform. According to newly published commercial information such a system would, in many cases, replace various specialist software programmes used by NHS trusts to collect and process data, alongside spreadsheets and paper documents.
“The system will support infection prevention and control activities to identify critical issues, proactively respond to improve the quality of care and streamline processes to reduce time spent on administrative and reporting tasks,” the contract notice said.
“Most NHS Trusts tend to manage infection control surveillance through the use of various systems, collating laboratory, patient and surgery data and manually searching through the data to identify patients of interest or complex scenarios. Paper and excel spreadsheets are also used to record and manage surveillance. This process is time consuming and risk of error. NHS trusts are finding that they do not have a robust infection control system to monitor and manage their patients.”
Source: Public Technology, 15 February 2023