Royal College of Paediatrics

RCPCH saves more than £1m over five years with a new workplace-based assessment system.

Royal College of Paediatrics and child health assessment systemsThe challenge

The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) plays a major role in postgraduate medical education and training of UK Paediatricians.

RCPCH needed a system to deliver, monitor and provide reports on workplace-based assessments for trainees, assessors and programme directors in the clinical community. They urgently needed to replace the existing system from a third party provider.

The objective was to have a new web-based system: piloted, implemented and deployed within eight months. This was to include the migration of all historical assessment data from the previous provider and, to ensure continuity, needed to make the old data available to end users of the new system.

The solution

fry was approached to tender and were subsequently invited to partner with the college on the project. Following detailed scoping and workflow analysis, we developed wireframes, and a prototype, and built the system. Named 'ASSET', for Assessment Services for Education and Training, it was ready for pilot as scheduled.

It wasn't all plain sailing, and migrating the data migration from the old system was a particular challenge. Once again fry's experience of the cleaning "dirty" legacy data in any migration were confirmed. We created all the necessary tools and procedures to carry out the required data cleansing and migration.

The result

The system was deployed to schedule in July 2009 and has proven to be robust, reliable and user friendly. ASSET will handle more than 100,000 assessment events each year and enables a wide range of reporting and data analysis. Further development is scheduled which includes:

  • developing the administration interface to enable one-touch reporting
  • ODBC access to create original and tailored queries
  • user management functionality
  • new forms
  • potentially, the adaptation of the system to enable the College's international partners to benefit from the system.
fry brought a lot to the project, not just software know-how. I was particularly impressed with their focus on work-flow analysis and their emphasis on what the product needed to do for all roles and levels of end user.

The College now has a fully managed system. They do not have to worry about hosting and support, and it has now been deployed nationally. In the process the College estimates that it will save well over a £1m in the first five years of life of the new system.