Oswestry Orthopaedic championed by Microsoft for flexible XML network

The Robert Jones & Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital in Oswestry is setting the standard for NHS Health Trusts according to software giant, Microsoft.

The hospital has spent five years building a clinical record database based on XML (Extensible Markup Language) in partnership with network specialist Graphnet.

With 45,000 patients in the system, the Trust now has over 300,000 XML documents in the database, making it one the largest repositories of XML clinical records in the world.

Andrew Roberts, a surgeon at the hospital, said the key benefits of the database were an improvement in processes and quality control, and a better allocation of resources across the Trust.

He added that XML also allowed the flexibility the hospital needed: "We wanted to keep the various existing departmental systems - it would have been impossible to replace all our legacy systems. XML allowed us to put the system together in building blocks rather than one sudden change."

The Trust plans to keep developing the database to add graphics and x-rays to patient records. It is also hoping to move to Microsoft's SQL 7 database to enable more complex searches.

Microsoft has launched its own 'technology blueprint' for NHS organisations to achieve the objectives of the government's Information for Health strategy. The software company is backing the popular XML language as a standard for healthcare data.