Blood service puts finger on the Pulse

Blood donor authority The National Blood Service has walked away with first prize in this year?s Healthcare IT effectiveness awards, writes Dan Sabbagh.

The prize was awarded at last week?s Healthcare Computing conference, for the timely completion of a project which had an ?unachievable and dangerous? schedule.

The project, Pulse, was a two year, #10 million program to create a single blood management system for England and Northern Ireland. Pulse replaced 15 geographically-dispersed systems with non-compatible data sets.

The core stock control and job scheduling systems in Pulse are based on a specialist package supplied by Savant, using Sysdeco?s Mimer database, and running on three clusters of Digital Alpha services. Networking services are provided by a BT-supplied SMDS network linking over 100 remote sites via Internet Protocol.

National Blood Service IT director Gary Barr said that ?by any standards this was a complex and difficult project. When the project started we were told the planned timetable was unachievable and even dangerous ? but we met the timescales and came in under budget.?

The service?s next step will be to develop electronic links between hospitals and the blood service using EDI via browser-based terminals attached to an extranet server at the blood service.