Waiting list management often fails after a trust changes its Patient Administration System [PAS]. This is not a rare event. And the elective care Intensive Support Team at NHS England want to put an end to it.

So they have put together a guide of things that trusts should consider before switching over to a new PAS. They are, as NHSE say, “sensible things” such as migrating sufficient data, understanding the logic for old and new data flows, and taking stock of report generation before developing reports for the new system.

But this underestimates the scale of the reporting problem.

Local information professionals have spent years building up all their internal and external reporting, using code that assumes the old PAS. When it is switched off, those reports stop working – not just the ‘feed the beast’ reports, but also those used to track and manage real patients along their care pathways. It takes months to build up new reports that work with the data structures and semantics of the new PAS, and data migration from the old PAS to the new does not help with that.

The solution can be described with disarming simplicity: build reports using data that doesn’t change when the PAS is replaced. Magic? No, just exceptionally good data management, using tried and trusted technology that exists today.

That is what the Unified Data Layer [UDL] from Insource does. We configure it for the old PAS, and the trust uses it for reporting. Then when the new PAS is being set up, we configure it for that too. On go-live day, the feeds swap over from the old PAS to the new, and the data in the UDL continues to flow as if nothing had happened. So all the reports carry on working.

Over the years we have delivered business continuity for many trusts through their PAS changes. So if you are taking that journey, get in touch. The time to achieve seamless reporting is at the planning stage.