We’re very pleased to announce that Flax has won a 3-year contract with the NHS Wales Informatics Service to support the Apache Lucene/Solr search engine used by the Welsh Clinical Portal, during which period we’ll be backing up the in-house team with our deep experience of Solr.
The Welsh Clinical Portal is a classic example of how a search engine can be used to bring together huge amounts of data. Many records are still paper based and electronic records are created across different applications, hospitals and GP practices. The Welsh Clinical Portal allows hospital clinicians to easily find and view essential healthcare information such as medication details and referral notes.
The system itself has been designed to handle up to 300 million documents and will be constantly updated with the thousands of new items added every day. Solr provides powerful and accurate search and fast response times.
As their recent newsletter notes, “this is considered to be the first time Solr has been applied to a health enterprise architecture on a national scale”. We’re seeing increasing adoption of open source software in the healthcare domain, with a recent development being NHS England’s creation of the Apperta Foundation to help manage the adoption of new open source applications that can easily be extended and re-used with no license fees payable. The Welsh Clinical Portal is a great example of what can be achieved with open source software while reducing costs – an essential consideration for a publicly-funded healthcare organisation.
If you need help designing, building or supporting applications based on Solr, for healthcare or any other application, do get in touch.
