South Manchester switches on PAS from CSC

The University Hospital of South Manchester NHS Trust has announced that it has gone live across the organisation with a new patient administration system supplied by Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC).

The acute hospital becomes the eleventh large hospital to switch on an iSoft iPM PAS system supplied by CSC as part of the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT). The system has also gone live at the trust’s smaller community hospital.

Ahead of switching the new system across the trust on 4 December, CSC and the trust provided training to 1,200 hospital staff.

South Manchester’s head of programme management, Richard Moulds told E-Health Insider: “The training was very important. It was role-based training, teaching staff not just how to use the system but how to do their jobs differently with the new system. We trained all 1200 staff over a nine week period, commencing at the end of last September. In six of our wards now, staff are able to do real-time ward administration on the system. Admissions, transfers and discharges can all be done using the iPM system.”

New PAS systems are intended to provide the first step in the development of integrated electronic patient records, the central objective of the NPfIT programme. Improved co-ordination between hospital departments also promises to help eliminate unnecessary duplication of data.

The iPM system provided stores and manages all non-clinical aspects of patient administration at the trust, for the in-patients and out-patients that attend Wythemshawe and Withington Community Hospital.

According to CSC the PAS system provided to South Manchester allows staff to link directly with the Choose and Book electronic appointment booking system used at GP practices to allow patients to choose their appointment times.

Mark Blakeman, director of business development and informatics for the trust said: “We have been working with CSC and NHS Connecting for Health towards this implementation for 18 months and it is a major accomplishment that we have ‘gone-live’ on schedule and with little disruption to the trust.”

Blakeman added: "As a teaching hospital with Foundation status, we are at the forefront of delivering a first-class service to our patients and therefore the linking of our new PAS system will allow us to see a more complete picture of a patient’s progress through the trust."

Moulds told EHI that the new system brought a number of benefits to the trust, including making all its systems compliant with the national programme, allowing them to move forward with their IM&T plans.

“With the new system, we will make financial savings by no longer paying for our PAS. We will capture a lot more information. The system will offer us a much more consistent approach to how we work with case note tracking for example. Our old system was not compliant with other software such as Choose and Book. With the new system, we are now compliant with the system and two-thirds of our bookings are now directly booked on the system.”

The trust was initially due to go live in September, but delayed implementation until issues arising from the Maidstone Data Centre crash were resolved, and the iPM Fleming system was available on the NPfIT from CSC.

Philip Gunn, CSC’s account executive for the trust said: “This is now our eleventh acute hospital PAS implementation in the NWWM region and the first Foundation Trust for the Manchester area. The smooth implementation is a great achievement for the 200 strong combined NHS and CSC team who worked long and hard to ensure the system was implemented without disruption to hospital services.”

In addition to PAS implementations at 11 large hospitals CSC has also implemented the PAS systems at 56 Primary Care Trusts, and four Mental Health Trusts.

CSC, which already was the lead contractor for the NPfIT programme in the NWWM region of England, took over from Accenture as lead contractor for the Eastern and North East regions earlier this month. The deal to switch prime contractors was negotiated by NHS Connecting for Health the agency responsible for NPfIT.