Birmingham’s City hospital goes live with iPM
- 17 October 2007
Birmingham’s City Hospital, part of Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust has gone live with iSoft’s iPM patient administration system, deployed by local service provider Computer Sciences Corporation.
The trust began data migration from the legacy iSoft PIMS PAS on 11 October and went live with iPM on Monday, 15 October.
The system deployed includes a new pathology system for the trust and will work alongside the existing iSoft iCC and iCM clinical solutions.
Sue Wilson, Connecting or Health programme manager at the trust, said: “We had no choice really, but to have a lengthy downtime. It took us some 40 hours to move the data from the legacy PAS system to the new PAS alone and then we had to factor in the other systems which make up the programme solutions for this complex and difficult go-live.”
A spokesperson for the trust told EHI that despite the difficulties they faced in switching off IT systems, migration had been smooth and the go-live had so far gone well.
Historical results, patient demographic information and case note numbers were made available via a new acquired clinical data archive.
During migration, staff had no access to any legacy IT systems and had to request all tests and investigations on paper. Pending the success of the system in the City hospital, the trust anticipates a go-live with iPM at the remaining Sandwell and Rowley sites on 11 November.
The trust has been preparing staff for the new system since July, with a series of readiness assessment workshops and a detailed programme plan sent in a memo to staff. An initial post-implementation report will be released in December.
Refresher training has been organised by trust officials if staff need further help with the new PAS.
Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust is the last trust in the West Midlands SHA to go-live with the iPM system. The deployment was organised by the authority as part of a ‘high level deployment plan for the next nine months’.
The SHA is planning the implementation of the new PAS upgrades for installed systems, which will include the functionality for 18 week wait. This has to be implemented in the period from the end of October to the end of December.
Once all the system upgrades have been completed, the SHA says it will commission a formal piece of work, backed by research evidence, which will include mapping new functionality to benefits as well as the extent to which the full utilisation of new features will avoid costs that are related to patient safety errors and duplication of information.
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Joe Fernandez
