CliniSys Group

Founded more than 30 years ago, CliniSys Group provides clinical laboratory management solutions used in 45 percent of the United Kingdom’s NHS Trust and laboratories. CliniSys has approximately 450 diagnostics IT professionals who deploy the company’s solutions in several languages in thousands of labs across 23 countries. In addition, CliniSys has a leading order communications and results reporting system with a large deployment footprint in the NHS.

The services CliniSys provides are vital for surveilling and sharing case reports with public health agencies, particularly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Since the pandemic began, CliniSys customers have called on the company to set up entirely new labs in previously unheard-of timeframes — sometimes in less than 24 hours.

Because of the increased time pressure, it’s imperative that CliniSys solutions be reliable, secure, and easy to use so that labs across the UK can accurately report testing and case data. Having Rhapsody embedded into their products has helped CliniSys meet this demand.

Examples from large and small production sites of throughput during the last 365 days

CliniSys has been involved in several Covid-related activities initiated by the UK government, including the establishment of Nightingale Hospitals and a recent mandate that labs use the National Pathology Exchange (NPEx) for Covid testing and reporting. In March 2020, the National Health System (NHS) began setting up seven temporary critical care facilities called Nightingale Hospitals. Several of the Nightingale Hospitals are using CliniSys to configure their laboratory information management systems (LIMS). For instance, the Birmingham Nightingale uses the CliniSys ICE product for ordering tests and reporting results and the Bristol Nightingale uses the WinPath Enterprise LIMS product for managing its pathology service.

CliniSys is also assisting with lab connectivity through NPEx — a hub that connects all UK labs together so that test requests and pathology results can be sent digitally from any lab to any lab in a matter of seconds. Prior to Covid, lab participation in NPEx was optional, but in March 2020, government leaders mandated that every lab doing Covid tests must use NPEx to exchange data in the fastest possible timeframe. NPEx is using CliniSys solutions embedded with Rhapsody to achieve this.

Data exchange through the NPEx is important because it allows test orders to be distributed to labs that have the most capacity to perform the test.

“With Covid the expectation is that testing will significantly increase, so this gives us an opportunity to distribute that demand across a number of laboratories where capacity may be available,” Markham said.

CliniSys embeds the Rhapsody Integration Engine into its solutions to translate and transform clinical data.

“Out of the box, Rhapsody brings us all the goodness that an integration engine should,” Markham said. “We know immediately we’ve got guaranteed message delivery. We’ve got the availability. We’ve got the performance. We’ve got the resilience.”

Using Rhapsody, CliniSys can deploy a series of communication points, routes, and message definitions onto every site, creating touch points back into its core products. “We then look at what the customer needs so that we can drop specific interfaces — which are bundles of communication points, routes, and filters — that serve a specific purpose,” Markham explained.

More specifically, CliniSys exposes functionality through a series of APIs. “We use Rhapsody to talk to those APIs on one side, and we’ll use Rhapsody to talk to other systems on the other side,” Markham said. These could include a patient administration system, results reporting system, vendor-specific system (such as NPEx), or national reporting system such as the cancer registry.

CliniSys also partners with other health IT vendors that require specific interfaces. Using Rhapsody allows them to create a building-block approach for repeatable configurations across sites, Markham said. “Rhapsody reduces the deployment time and testing time and creates a much more robust and resilient solution.”