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System C is First Health Tech Supplier to Announce Completion of v6.3 CDS – After 10 Months and 6000 Person Hours.

28th April 2022

UK health and social care software specialist, System C is the first health tech company to announce completion of its Commissioning Data Sets (CDS) v6.3 delivery.

The programme of work has been substantial, taking 6000 person hours of development and deployment time over the course of 10 months. It is a significant and important change to System C’s core PAS and BI functionality.

Rollout of the new release began in March to the first three sites and will be rolled out across 28 CareFlow EPR sites in total over the coming months. The solution will support both CDS v6.2 and v6.3 over the transition period to allow Trusts to implement the change once local processes have been adjusted to support the collection of the new data items. System C’s XML translation service, XMLTS, has also had the required changes incorporated to support the submission of the new CDS data sets to the Secondary Uses Service (SUS).

System C deployment teams, consisting of implementation staff, project managers, training team and installations, will be supporting Trusts to ensure the update is in place well ahead of April 2023, which is the date when they will be expected to have changed from sending CDS v6.2 to v6.3 submissions. All existing modular collateral has been revised to support the change, including training documentation and videos plus relevant customer documentation.

The move to CDS v6.3 is crucial for a number of reasons. CDS has been unchanged since v6.2 was released in 2012, so there is a long-standing need to make changes to bring it up to date and to conform with other standards and NHS Data Model and Dictionary Data item updates. On top of that, several gaps were highlighted during the pandemic. A number of SNOMED codes (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms) were authored to support data capture around diagnosis of covid-19 and other procedures to treat patients. However, the biggest acute data set, CDS, wasn’t able to flow SNOMED CT codes.

The CDS v6.3 update enables SMOMED CT codes to flow for diagnoses, procedures, observations, findings and scored assessment codes, including those related to covid-19 but also other SNOMED codes as well.

It also includes priority NHS England and NHS Improvement/policy related changes, changes in support of other standards (e.g., Treatment Function and Main Specialty Standard, Overseas Visiting Category Standard) and various minor data item updates.

The CDS v6.3 Information Standard Notice (ISN) was published in June 2021. CDS v6.3 will go live for data submissions in April 2022, with a 12-month transition period.

System C joint CEO, Markus Bolton said:

"We are obviously delighted and relieved to have completed this piece of work. Whilst we understand the importance of changes such as these, they are a massive burden on our development and delivery teams and for our customers.  It was however essential that we delivered in time for our client Trusts to meet their contractual commitments and we are pleased to have achieved that."

System C has trebled in size over the last five years, becoming a leading provider of software to the hospital, social care, and public health sectors in the UK. The company provides a full clinical and administration system, CareFlow EPR, which has doubled its user base to 30 NHS Trusts, while over half of NHS Trusts use its pharmacy systems and the company is market leader in Electronic Prescribing and Medicines Administration (EPMA). The business is supporting several Trusts as they progress towards meeting the requirements of the Minimum Digital Foundations (MDF) and HIMSS 6/7.

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