What we offer

With extensive experience in designing, developing and supporting a wide range of hospital systems, we are able to offer a wide range of services to NHS Trusts, whether you’re looking for consultancy for a procurement, a solution for integrating your systems, training, bespoke developments or extending the life of your legacy systems.

Image from photo by Brakspear, Creative Commons Licence

INTEGRATION Today’s NHS has a wide range of computer systems from many suppliers, which need to communicate with each other. Reality specialises in providing interfaces that get your systems talking to each other seamlessly, while keeping up to date with the latest standards.

RealLinks

Image from photo by Bobjgalindo, Creative Commons Licence

Our flagship product RealLinks has been used in most Trusts in the South West since its launch in 1996. It’s come a long way since those early days of sending pathology results to GPs, and is now a highly stable and cost-effective way of integrating your Caché or MUMPS-based hospital systems with your external systems. It supports real-time two-way communication between your hospital systems and any external system using either HL7 or proprietary message formats. RealLinks allows you to connect systems with your patient index, pathology system, inpatients and outpatients - and as it’s a modular system, you only pay for the modules you need, and can add extra functionality later on.

Ensemble

Reality has had an excellent long-term working relationship with Intersystems and can offer HL7 interfaces using Intersystems Ensemble. This highly flexible environment allows us to help you interface any of your HL7-compliant systems quickly, efficiently and at a great price.

LEGACY SYSTEMS All four of us in Reality worked in the NHS in the 1980s on a variety of MUMPS hospital systems. We have an intimate knowledge of legacy pathology systems (such as Phoenix and Blood Transfusion), legacy MUMPS patient administration systems (such as Trent PAS), and the legacy pharmacy system subsequently adopted by McKesson. We can find our way round most old MUMPS systems, even if you no longer have the documentation. With legal requirements to keep patient records for decades, we can provide highly cost-effective solutions, either by extracting your patient and results data to a format suitable for importing into an external system or data warehouse, or by porting the system to a standalone PC running Intersystems Caché, and converting the legacy enquiry functions to give you long-term access to decades-old data.

TRAINING AND CONSULTANCY With an extensive background in NHS IM&T and practical experience in managing the change that goes with it, we can provide a range of services to help changes in your organisation run more smoothly. We can offer Project Management, programming and application training, and consultancy on a wide range of hospital-initiated projects.