Northern Ireland health trusts implement diabetes management solution
Hicom’s Diamond.NET and Twinkle.NET solutions provide cradle-to-grave management of adult and paediatric diabetes care
Northern Ireland’s five health and social care trusts will benefit from improved auditing and greater visibility of countrywide cradle-to-grave diabetes care after implementing web-based adult and paediatric care management solutions.
The trusts are deploying Hicom’s Diamond.NET and Twinkle.NET solutions to provide an accessible, real-time, managed view of a patient’s diabetes care and their future requirements throughout the lifecycle of their condition.
The move comes following the Review of Public Administration, which resulting in the merger of trusts to five across Northern Ireland. They are Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, Northern Health and Social Care Trust, South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust, Southern Health and Social Care Trust, and Western Health and Social Care Trust. As a result of the merger, the trusts initiated a review of the existing 12 diabetes databases.
The outcome of that exercise identified merging and upgrading of Hicom’s Diamond solution, already in use across the trusts, as the most viable solution for the modernisation of technology.
Sean Dooher, regional diabetes ICT lead, said: “The review into adult diabetes solutions presented a number of options and in terms of time frames, costs and meeting the requirements of the organisations the preferred regional approach was to upgrade to Hicom’s web-based Diamond.NET solution.”
In addition to the adult Diamond.NET solution, the decision was taken to extend the deployment of Twinkle.NET into all trusts to ensure standardisation of records and improved auditing was being maintained at paediatric level, too. This could ultimately feed into the Diamond.NET solution.
Dooher said: “We were looking for a solution to facilitate the standardisation of the recording of diabetes information across the region for both adult and paediatric patients. The implementation of the Hicom solutions has ensured a strong foundation for this standardisation and has also provided the additional benefit of a single web-based system that enables those involved in the care of diabetic patients to work using one accessible, web-based diabetes solution within each trust environment.”
He added: “The potential for an interface between the Hicom solutions and the Northern Ireland Electronic Care Record (NIECR), or other systems, will be realised over the course of time. Initially moving forward, we aim to explore the merging of Twinkle.net and Diamond.NET and will work closely with Hicom to make further improvements.”