March before Royal Free CRS fixes assessed

Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust says that it will be March before it is able to assess whether sufficient improvements have been made to the BT-supplied Cerner Care Records System.

Problems caused by the CRS system were last year reported to have cost the trust £7.2m, disrupted the delivery of care and led to delays in patients getting treatment, causing it to miss national access targets.

On 6 October 2008 the trust began work with BT and Cerner on what intended to be a 90-day ‘recovery plan’ to fix 22 known problems in the CRS software. Latest papers from the trust say though progress is being made it will take further time to assess whether all identified problems have been fixed.

With all further Cerner implementations in London on hold until problems at Royal Free and Barts and the London NHS Trust are fixed, the news will come as a blow to the London Programme for IT, anxious to restart the programme. BT, the local service provider for London, is likely to be similarly keen to restart work on its stalled £1bn NHS contract.

In his latest report to the board Andrew Way, chief executive of Royal Free, says it had proved necessary to extend the 90 day plan to the end of January, with evaluation of staff feedback on fixes set to happen in March.

Way’s report recaps the trust’s position with the Cerner CRS, provided to it under the NHS National Programme for IT: “After an initially successful go-live, it became clear that its implementation has had an impact on the trusts finance and national patient access targets.”

Way reports good progress is being made on the 22 main problems identified: “The issues that were set out to be agreed in that plan, with a few small exceptions arguably outside of the control of either BT or Cerner, are on track to be addressed by the end of January.”

The Royal Free chief executive says, “The system is evidently more stable, following changes made in November and December. A small amount of additional functionality agreed as a priority with clinical teams was added to the system in mid-January and the final additional changes as part of the 90 day plan are due to be inserted on 26th January.”

After this latest software update the trust’s project board will monitor progress and “test the views of clinical and administrative staff in early March to assess the degree of improvement”.

In a January finance board paper the extent of the financial difficulties caused by uncertain data quality and inability to record and report on some activity are set out.

“The majority of the adverse variance is due to Cerner lost income and extra costs incurred in remedial actions. There are also underlying overspend issues in a number of areas, which have been in part due to managers being distracted by the impact of Cerner on both management capacity and having correct information to act upon.”

Link

Royal Free evaluates Cerner Fixes