University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) houses state of the art clinical informatics with one of the most advanced electronic data systems in the world. It is also regarded as an exemplar for its clinical and non-clinical governance systems.

Our unique approach means we can build a customised range of business intelligence systems to suit any healthcare organisation to help it understand the quality of care it delivers, its financial efficiency, market share and opportunities.

One of the advantages of UHB’s informatics capability is that it allows the Trust to benchmark its performance for individual disease groups and clinical specialties with other hospitals in Europe, the United States and beyond. UHB has access to the United States Hospitals’ Honor Roll and can compare its in-hospital mortality with the Honor Roll data.

UHB is funded to set up and provide informatics expertise to the West Midlands Quality Observatory which enables clinical performance to be benchmarked across the region. This has been recognised by the Department of Health.

UHB can offer the following bespoke systems:

Clinician interface

Prescribing Information and Communication System (PICS)

PICS is a rules based decision support system which operates in all inpatient, outpatients and day case areas. It supports full e-prescribing and drug administration for both routine and chemotherapy treatments, requesting and reporting of laboratory investigations, clinical observations and assessments and extensive order communications, including imaging requests and internal referrals.

Business intelligence

Clinical Quality Dashboard

This system gives staff real-time information on a variety of clinical quality indicators – such as missed drug doses, adverse events, patient experience feedback, staff sickness levels – for their area and the organisation overall, to enable them to better manage patient care.

Healthcare Evaluation Data (HED)

This interactive tool enables clinical and managerial staff to evaluate the quality of healthcare delivery and operational efficiency against other organisations locally, nationally and internationally. The HED team offers an holistic approach to improving and monitoring performance to healthcare providers across four key dimensions:

1. efficiency
2. patient safety
3. quality
4. finance

Quality and Outcomes Research Unit (QuORU)

The QuORU was set up in September 2009 and links a wide range of information systems together to enable clinical teams to develop useful and innovative quality indicators to use within their specialties to monitor and improve patient care, experience and outcomes.

International Health Benchmarking

UHB’s informatics capability allows the Trust to benchmark its performance for individual disease groups and clinical specialties with other hospitals nationally and internationally.

Patient portal

myhealth@QEHB

myhealth@QEHB is a web-based system which has been developed by UHB to provide patients with chronic health conditions with high-quality information and support to allow informed choice and shared decision making. Early feedback suggests it supports the delivery of high quality care through increased knowledge, support and communication. For more information visit the myhealth@QEHB website.