Worthing to switch on Millennium PAS

Worthing Hospital NHS Trust will this weekend become the latest hospital in the South of England to go live with a new patient administration system from Fujitsu.

The trust will switch over to the Cerner Millennium PAS software, known as Cerner release zero, under the multi-billion NHS IT programme. Worthing will become the seventh NHS acute trust in the South of England – out of a total of 47 – to get the Millennium system under the NHS IT programme.

A spokesperson for the trust told E-Health Insider: "We are going live this weekend with CRS. We are preparing staff for this transition."

One clinician familiar with the system told EHI that he considered Millennium a fairly basic patient administration system (PAS) that didn’t offer the trust much more than it already had.

"To me it looks like Cerner RO has been stripped of everything other than the most basic PAS functions and we already had a very good PAS!" The clinician also said that non-Cerner solutions had been put in place by the trust to handle "patient handover and 18 weeks compliance".

They added that the return on the effort involved in the implementation would only be worthwhile if the system provided the foundations for building detailed clinical records (CRS). "What a huge investment in time and money to end up where we were. I can only hope that Cerner R0 is a firm foundation for building a CRS."

Another well-placed source described how staff expectations of what the system would provide "had been managed downwards" at the trust. "It’s a PAS with a large number of work arounds".

The version of the system to be installed at Worthing will be the same Release Zero that has previously been installed at trusts including Winchester, Surrey and Sussex, Milton Keynes. In London the local service provider BT has so far installed the software at just one NHS trust Barnet and Chase Farm.

Cerner were contracted to deliver release zero to trusts on the South, based on the version of the Millennium software it had begun to install at Homerton in London, ahead of the NHS IT programme.

However, this software has since required significant modification. It has since transpired that Homerton had experienced problems with Millennium, including the system losing the appointment details of more than 200 patients. Similar problems with lost appointment details subsequently occurred at some of the trusts in the South of England that recieved the software.

In July the outgoing CfH boss Richard Granger in an interview with CIO Magazine, said of the version of Cerner Millennium installed in the South: "It really isn’t usable because they have been building a system with Fujitsu without listening to what end users want. They have taken some account but they then had to take a lot more. Now they are being held to account because that’s my job."