Queen Mary’s Sidcup goes live with Cerner

Queen Mary’s Sidcup NHS Trust has become the second NHS trust in London to go live with a Cerner Millennium patient administration system (PAS) supplied by BT under the NHS IT Programme.

The trust went live with the new system over 28 October and 29 October, becoming the third implementation of a PAS by BT in London. Two of these have been at Queen Mary’s Sidcup (QMS). BT has also installed Cerner Millennium at Barnet and Chase Farm

The system has gone live in A&E and inpatients, together with outpatients, with functionality including case note tracking and Choose and Book. Some access is also available in Bexley PCT

Steve Huddlestone CRS Programme Director at Queen Mary’s Sidcup NHS Trust, said: "I can confirm Queen Mary’s Sidcup has now gone live with our new care records system replacing IDX Carecast system with Cerner Millennium. At the same time Queen Mary’s became the first hospital in the country to link Direct Choose and Book to Cerner Millennium when we went live with the system." 

Huddlestone added: "So far the change over has been extremely smooth but we need to ensure our people are entirely confident in using Cerner Millennium" 

QMS now has the dubious distinction of being the only NHS trust to have one new PAS system installed by BT, only to have to replace it less than two years later.

BT, the local service provider (LSP) for London, had installed IDX Carecast at the trust in 2005. But in November 2006 BT dumped IDX – by then owned by GE – as its hospital software supplier, replacing the company with Cerner.

A spokesperson for BT confirmed to E-Health Insider that QMS has become the first trust to use Cerner Millennium with the ability to directly book appointments into the Choose and Book system, the service run by Atos Origin using software supplied by Cerner.

The spokesperson said: “Yes and this represents the first directly bookable service available on a Cerner Millennium system under the National Programme, allowing GPs to book patients straight onto available appointment slots at QMS.”

None of the seven installations of Cerner Millennium by Fujitsu, the LSP for the South of England, include the direct booking facility. EHI understands this anomaly is because the necessary initial reference site in the South for direct booking has had to repeatedly delay going live.

QMS first switched on IDX’s Carecast system after a fraught implementation in November 2005, but it was October 2006 by the time the system become fully operational and integrated with Choose and Book.

The spokesperson added: “This is the second time that the QMS Trust has been first of type users of Choose and Book as they did this on Carecast too.”