Clinical System Solutions

The Hospital Integrated Clinical Support System

HICSS has been designed to support the process of patient care and meet the needs of clinical governance and clinical research in secondary care.

A key strength of HICSS is it's ability to capture highly detailed clinical data as part of the routine day-to-day operation of the hospital - whilst being a highly sophisticated system, it is easy to use and highly intuitive to clinical staff.

HICSS can be fully integrated with the hospital Patient Master Index (PMI), Patient Administration System (PAS), Pathology system and other systems (e.g. Oncology). This ensures that patient demographic and laboratory test data are available at the point of care and always consistent with the main hospital systems. A key advantage is that clinicians are not required to duplicate input and maintenance of these other critical data items.

HICSS has been designed from the start as a true web system and all user interaction is through a web browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer). Clinical data are stored in a robust relational database (Oracle, SQLServer or Sybase), and the system utilises strong security mechanisms as is appropriate for this type of system. Data interchange is made easy using XML/HL7 and state-of-the-art technologies such as SOAP, XML-Protocol and Sockets or older file-based methods.

The clinical knowledge for the system has been acquired as a result of an NHS/Private-sector partnership between Scorpio and Southampton University Hospitals Trust. The clinical systems are always based on national or society/professional datasets where such a dataset is available. Significant effort has gone into the system to ensure that it reinforces best practice protocols issued by the authorities (e.g. CHAI/NICE/NSFs).