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"The PROMs are very important to an organisation like The Christie"

"Our key approach at the Christie is data first, not applications first. Data is the most important thing to us at The Christie and that's how we should approach everything we do," said Phil Bottomley, EHR Strategic Lead at The Christie NHS Foundation Trust.

Phil Bottomley, who champions the modernisation of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) platform, including the migration to open platforms, and the associated data strategy, was the first guest of our Better webinar series "openEHR: Bringing theory to life". He leads the team at the Christie NHS Foundation Trust that developed a suite of 24 ePROM forms using Better low-code tools in just four months and has shared his experience at the webinar.

Having vast experience in electronic health records, Phil Bottomley said that The Christie was always very good at capturing data, but they were just not very good at doing anything with that data because it was stored in a way that was very unstructured and very difficult to analyse. "The reason that we opted for openEHR approach was because of the nature of The Christie as an organisation," said the guest and added that they started to focus more on the data part.

"The Christie is a specialist cancer site and the DNA of The Christie is to innovate, to research, and use innovation and research together to help improve cancer outcomes and improve cancer treatments. When we reflected on what is the nature of The Christie and then applied that to the electronic health record, we came to the conclusion that data is really important to The Christie and capturing that data in an accurate, high-quality way that is within our sovereignty and control, is important. And that's how we really fell upon openEHR as a strategy because openEHR is all about thinking about the data first rather than focusing on the application," said Phil Bottomley.

PROMs align with the national strategy
Phil's team developed 24 patient recorded outcome measures in just four months and he said that PROMs align with the UK national strategy of moving more care out of the hospitals and more to homes. "So what our care teams do now is rather than having a standard day of appointments, they hold the virtual appointments and then they decide which patients are they actually going to bring in, based on the PROMs data that they've submitted from home," he said.

He also added: "One of The Christie's core things is personalised care because cancer is a disease that is monitored for a very, very long period after you've had your surgery or your chemotherapy. So the PROMs are very important to an organisation like The Christie".

 

For more insights and experience from
The Christie EHR modernisation

watch the webinar here

 

 

 

 

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