QMH goes it alone with iSoft

ISoft has signed a £1m deal with NHS Wandsworth to provide the latest version of its CliniCom Patient Administration System to Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton.

The contract will see Queen Mary’s Hospital split from its joint iSoft PAS, which is currently hosted by Kingston Hospitals NHS Trust, after Kingston goes-live with Cerner Millennium as part of its commitment to the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

Earlier this year, E-Health Insider revealed that NHS Wandsworth had abandoned its plans to install Cerner Millennium after claiming that the system is not suited to modern community-based services.

The primary care trust said the change to its plans was due to repeated delays and concerns about security as well as the unsuitability of Millennium for federated polyclinic models of care.

Documents that provide details of the business case for the iSoft PAS show that although the hospital only has until March 2010 to replace its PAS, it has agreed not to go-live until Kingston has successfully deployed Cerner.

Kingston is expected to go-live with Cerner Millennium on 30 November.

The document states: “It is not envisaged that the QMH go-live will take place until a reasonable period following KH’s Cerner go-live, to avoid causing any detrimental affects to their deployment. However KH have indicated that the current PAS contract is only extendable until March 2010.”

The document addresses concerns that the PAS will take two months to implement, indicating that Cerner will need to be running smoothly by around the end of January for the PAS to go-live in March.

It adds: “If new PAS arrangements are not in place for QMH by March 2010, there is a danger that QMH will not have a system on which to record and administrate patient activity and produce information reporting.”

Once the PAS is implemented the hospital intends to improve functionality and integration with primary care by implementing iSoft’s PatientCentre solution “on a gradual basis once Cerner is embedded in at KH.”

This will allow GPs to access their patient information and provide improved functionality for users generally.

The Wandsworth contract includes £182,000 in licence and implementation fees, and £580,000 for support and maintenance over three years.

The business case states that the trust will continue to look into developing a solution to support the polyclinic model with a partner such as EMIS or CSE RiO in the longer term.

This week iSoft also announced that Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has signed a £2m contract for a common PAS across its Northern and Central campus.

The Northern campus will see an upgrade of its current iSoft PAS while the Central campus will move from it McKesson TotalCare PAS so that there is a trust-wide solution from iSoft.

Link: iSoft