Weston goes live with Cerner

Weston Area Health NHS Trust has become to the second NHS trust in the South of England to begin to use clinical software from Cerner under the £12.4bn National Programme for IT.

The trust confirmed to E-Health Insider that it had introduced the “initial stage” of the new software system over the last weekend in July. It said that this represents the first stage of the development of the electronic patient records – also known as the NHS Care Records Service – at the hospital.

The trust has begun to use the Cerner Millennium clinical software – termed Release 0 – supplied by the local service provider for the South Fujitsu.

The trust told E-Health Insider the software provided includes a patient administration system (PAS) and ‘emergency department’. The trust is the first in the South of England to begin using US-based Cerner’s ‘emergency department’ software for A&E.

“PACS [picture archiving and communications system] is due to follow at the end of the year,” a trust spokesperson told EHI.

EHI understands the full range of functionality in the Millennium system are planend to be used including modules for theatres, reporting, outpatients, inpatients including maternity, electronic whiteboard, discharge summaries and clinical coding. 

The spokesperson added that the system had been implemented to be available across the trust. So far the system is understood to largely being used by the A&E department, and initially only by a relatively small number of users, although over 1,700 users have been registered. 

Sources close to the trust indicate that the system was switched on despite a number of issues being outstanding. Problems were reportedly being worked on with inpatient and outpatient waiting list software and registering patients.

As of Monday the trust was still working to ‘go live’ for elective admissions from inpatient and daycase waiting lists. A 31 July letter from trust chief executive Mark Gritten to staff advised them that for outpatients there was “an issue with the clinic templates, that could result in patients being booked into slots that are not available, or have already been booked into.”

He told staff that work was underway to compare old clinic templates on the previous PAS system with those on the new Millennium system, to make sure patients can only be booked into available slots.

As part of the implementation historic patient data will be migrated. “Data relating to all patients seen in the last three years, all outpatients with pending appointments, and those on current in-patient waiting lists, will be put on the new system,” the trust spokesperson said.

Despite initial teething problems the go live at Weston will come as a relief to Fujitsu, Cerner and the Department of Health. Previously Fujitsu had only managed one troubled implementation of Cerner at the highly specialised Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, Oxford. With Cerner expected to be officially named the new clinical software supplier for the NHS in London a ‘success’ was urgently needed.

An indication of the importance attached by the DH to Weston switching on a new system comes from the fact that on Monday both the regional implementation director for Southern cluster and Nick Relph, the regional senior responsible office for NPfIT, were all at the trust.

The trust told EHI that it was spending £750,000 on implementing the new system, “but, because this is part of a national programme, the majority of the costs are being met by a national fund, and supporting funds are also coming from the NHS South West Strategic Health Authority.”

Gritten said the new system will eventually “revolutionise the way information is used and transferred across the NHS.”

Gritten added: “Our doctors and nurses will benefit hugely from access to more comprehensive, up-to-date patient information and a fast, reliable means of recording information, which will lead to greater streamlining of clinical practice.

“We are delighted to have taken these first steps towards the delivery of 21st century IT for a modern and more efficient NHS.”