Cambridgeshire live with RiO

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust went live with its electronic patient record system RiO over the weekend.

The mental health trust, which provides services to 750,000 people, signed the contract for CSE Healthcare System’s EPR in July this year. RiO is replacing the trust’s three separate patient administration systems.

Jane Berezynskyj, programme manager for the trust, told ehealth Insider last Thursday that everything had gone to plan so far and the trust was ready for the go-live.

“This is the planned go-live date which doesn’t happen often in NHS IT, especially with electronic patient records. We’ve reached every milestone so far,” she said.

“I think there’s always an element of nervousness, but we’re ready. We’ve checked the system several times, we’ve tested it with operational users and we have successfully migrated our data.”

RiO has become a common system in the mental health sector due to its widespread deployment in London and the South, where local service provider BT deployed RiO as a ‘strategic’ system.

Berezynskyj said that apart from a few glitches, the implementation process at Cambridgeshire and Peterborough had been relatively painless so far. She said it was all down to getting clinicians on board.

“We have got great clinical engagement that makes a huge difference. We started by saying to clinicians; ‘here’s a new system that you have helped us choose, how would you like us to set it up?’

“Our staff have all been trained and people seem very positive about it. The end users have been engaged with the project the whole way.”

She added: “This isn’t an IT project; it’s IT enablement of clinical processes. “

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough would have been due to get Lorenzo from local service provider CSC, but left the National Programme for IT in the NHS following analysis of its “strategic objectives”.

The trust, which provides services to 750,000 people, went out to tender in August 2011 for an EPR that would provide a single clinical record.

The £1.8m contract between the two organisations will run for six years, with the possibility of a two year extension.

The trust confirmed to EHI today that it successfully went live with RiO as planned.