Morecambe Bay goes live with PAS from CSC

Three sites in University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust have gone live with an iSoft patient administration system (PAS) that includes, for the first time, the A&E administration module from iSoft’s Lorenzo reference solution.

CSC, the local service provider for the North West and West Midlands, installed the system in a ‘big bang’ implementation, with the older Siemens PAS being replaced over one weekend with the new system.

E-Health Insider has been told that the system implemented is iSoft’s iPM with elements of Lorenzo technology. This is the same system recently implemented in Birmingham Women’s Health Care NHS Trust, but with the extra Lorenzo A&E administrative functionality.

Ian Johnson, account executive at CSC for the cluster, told EHI that the implementation represented the largest single increase in users so far for the LSP: "We have got over 2,500 registered users. About 2,000 have actually used the system at least once."

Johnson added that there were now around 1,200 regular users of the system, which covers 500,000 patients in the Morecambe Bay area.

The implementation of Lorenzo’s A&E module, Johnson explained, meant that for the first time the three sites, Furness General Hospital in Barrow-in-Furness, Royal Lancaster Infirmary and Westmoreland General Hospital in Kendal, are running on the same instance of the PAS software. A key feature of the implementation is that admissions from A&E are now updated in real time.

Johnson told EHI that this was the first time CSC had attempted an implementation across such a wide geographical area (900 square miles) in a short time. "There needs to be a fairly strong working relationship to have a very strong project… that’s borne out over the go live weekend."

"The PAS they had previously, they were happy with. But they bought into the vision of the single electronic patient record. Putting in our PAS was the first step."

Steve Fairclough, head of health informatics at the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust, said: "The success of this project is a testament to the hard-working and dedicated NHS staff at all levels within the trust."

The three sites had already been using the ORMIS theatre system from iSoft before they had the new PAS system installed. Five years’ worth of data has been transferred from the old Siemens PAS system to the CSC-supplied iSoft replacement. The old PAS system is still available should users need to access data older than five years.

To date , the CSC Alliance have carried out 41 deployments of patient administration software in 50 PCTs, nine acute trusts and four mental health trusts. It has also delivered eight ’emergency bundles’ of departmental clinical systems.