Royal Berks live with Cerner Millennium

Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust went live with its Cerner Millennium electronic patient record system yesterday.

The Emergency Department went live first thing, at 6am on Sunday, and was followed by all other areas before the start of play this morning, a trust spokesperson said.

EHealth Insider understands the trust has taken the Millennium patient administration sytem, A&E system and bed management system MPage.

The trust had planned to go live in March, but this was put back due to “outstanding technical issues.” After that it planned to go live in May, but seems to have spent further time resolving ‘Priority 1’ issues.

At the trust’s April board meeting, the chief executive said that Cerner had agreed in principle to meet the cost of any manual workarounds required in the event of Priority 1 issues not being resolved before go live.

At the previous month’s meeting, the chief executive said the need to postpone the go live because of unresolved priority 1 issues was “disappointing” as the dress rehearsal in early March had been a success.

Royal Berkshire quit the National Programme for IT in the NHS in 2008. EHealth Insider reported in June 2009 that it had signed a deal with University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre to deliver the Cerner Millennium system.

EHI understands that UPMC is still involved in the deployment, but the EPR is being mainly implemented by Cerner and the trust.