Imperial confirms Cerner roll-out plans

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust plans to go-live with the Cerner Millennium patient administration system and maternity module in spring next year.

The trust deployed the first module of its Millennium deployment – order communications – as part of the National Programme for IT in the NHS in September last year. This provided clinicians with electronic ordering and results reporting for pathology and radiology.

Chief information officer Kevin Jarrold said that building on that successful implementation, the trust is now planning the next phase of the roll-out of the system. This will involve the implementation of the PAS modules along with maternity functionality.

“Once the PAS and maternity modules have fully bedded in, Imperial College Healthcare is planning an incremental roll out of clinical documentation and electronic prescribing,” Jarrold added. “This will provide the trust with the key elements of a fully electronic patient record.”

Imperial College Healthcare faced criticism from local councils last week for record keeping blunders. Earlier this year, it wrote to GPs asking for help in tracing patients referred to it for treatment, whose files had been duplicated or opened but not closed.

It has emerged that 86 patients referred for a possible cancer diagnosis are still unaccounted for, while a review group has still to determine whether 25 out of 74 patients who had died had been affected by the problems.

A joint letter from Westminster, Hammersmith and Fulham and Kensington and Chelsea councils said there were unhappy with a “lack of transparency” from the trust about the impact on patient care.

However, Imperial College Healthcare continues to say that it does not believe “any patients have come to serious harm as a result of our poor record keeping.”

Jarrold said the trust is making good progress against the roll-out plan and has an anticipated go-live date in spring 2013. The final date will be set towards the end of this year.

“For an organisation of the size and complexity of Imperial College Healthcare, this will involve a very complex implementation,” he said.

Jarrold said 7,500 trust staff will need to understand new workflows and be trained in the use of the Cerner Millennium application.

About 3,500 outpatient clinics will need to be created within the new system and 500,000 future appointments transferred from the old patient administration system into Cerner Millennium.

“We see the implementation more as a clinical change programme than an IT project,” he added.

The Cerner order communications module is currently integrated into an IMS Maxims PAS which only went live across Imperial’s five sites in December 2010.

The trust explained previously that it chose to deploy the IMS Maxims PAS because it wanted to start the Millennium deployment on a common system.

A number of systems were in use before then as the trust was formed in 2007 in a merger of St Mary’s NHS Trust, Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust and the faculty of medicine at Imperial College, London.