Moorfield's OpenEyes catches award judges’ eyes

Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has been shortlisted for a clinical IT leadership award for OpenEyes, its open source electronic patient record system, in the E-Health Insider (EHI) Awards 2012. The EHI Awards reward excellence in healthcare IT and are judged by a panel of distinguished industry experts. The winner will be announced during an awards ceremony in London in October.

Developed by a multi-disciplinary team of eight, led by consultant surgeon and former medical director at Moorfields Mr. Bill Aylward, the first of the Open Eyes modules went live in January this year. The module delivered the administrative functionality which includes booking and waiting list management.

Three clinical modules will be released in September (4 September). These provide the functionality for: simple prescribing; OpNote which allows surgeons to electronically record surgical notes including diagrams and pictures; and issuing correspondence. This also includes discharge letters for GPs that are pre-populated with information such as the latest surgery and prescription and the post-operative review.

Other clinical services modules in development include: pharmacy, opthoptics, optometrists, pre-operative assessments, audit and the research facility modules. The team have collaborated with over 40 other clinicians outside Moorfields to develop and test the functionality of various modules, including Cataract in collaboration with Fife, and Glaucoma in collaboration with Cardiff.

Delighted that the team have been named in the awards shortlist, Bill Aylward believes that the OpenEyes system will bring to the NHS, "effective electronic records that clinicians will want to use." This, he says, should result "in huge improvements in data quality, and facilitation of patient safety, quality, audit, research, and clinical governance."

To date the OpenEyes team is pleased with the flexibility and responsiveness of the modular system of development and Bill's particular favourite feature is the drawing module.

The system's architecture and its compatibility with smartphone technology, also means the development team can regularly upgrade different modules independently of each other, including when a clinical need arises.

"The advantage is that as one module needs upgrading, it can be done without disrupting the whole system or waiting months for an expensive update, which is clearly a real benefit in a clinical environment," explains Bill. "As the system was developed using open source software, different hospitals can take the system and configure to local needs should they choose to use it."

Implementation of the entire system is expected to be complete by the end of 2013.

Editor's Notes

Moorfields developed OpenEyes in response to the need to replace its old patient record system - e-patient. It has invested £3.5m in Open Eyes over four years. The trust expects to recoup its investment by delivering cost savings of £4.5m over the same period. The project was initiated in 2010 and the development of the system began in 2011.

For further information about the EHI Awards 2012 please visit http://www.ehealthawards.com

Moorfields is one of the world's leading eye hospitals, providing expertise in clinical care, research and education. We have provided excellence in eye care for more than 200 years and we continue to be at the forefront of new breakthroughs and developments. We are an integral part of one of the UK's first academic health science centres, UCL Partners, and were one of the first NHS organisations to achieve foundation trust status in 2004.

We treat the entire range of eye diseases, from common complaints to rare conditions which require treatments not available anywhere else in the UK. We dealt with more than 475,000 patient visits in 2011/12 at our main hospital base in London's City Road and at 19 other sites in and around the capital, enabling us to provide expert care closer to patients' homes.

With our research partners at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, we run one of the largest ophthalmic research programmes in the world and have the highest measure of scientific productivity and impact in the world for our research activity.
For further information, please visit www.moorfields.nhs.uk.

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