Case Study: Royal Bolton Hospital NHS Foundation Trust achieves seamless HL7 integration and rapid interface delivery with InterSystems Ensemble

Royal Bolton Hospital NHS Foundation Trust integrates its healthcare systems seamlessly

Royal Bolton Hospital NHS Foundation Trust prepared to move from a locally hosted Patient Administration System to a centrally hosted CSC PAS under the NPfIT programme, but faced a strict requirement: ensuring the CSC applications could communicate with its existing legacy systems using HL7 v2. With a tight deadline, limited in-house integration experience and some poorly documented interfaces, the Trust needed a modern, standards-based integration engine that would let its IT team take control of interface development and reduce dependence on external suppliers.

The Trust selected InterSystems Ensemble and, with vendor support, rapidly developed the first eight interfaces and then implemented four more internally within three months using Ensemble’s HL7 adapters, graphical transformation tools and Caché database. Go-live was smooth, patient data now flows to multiple department screens (reducing manual entry errors), costs and supplier dependence were cut, and using the same platform and standards as CSC ensured compliance, high performance and ongoing flexibility for future integrations.

Royal Bolton Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

Ken Bradshaw

Head of IT Strategy and Implementation