Imperial plans PAS go-live

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust has confirmed plans to go-live with the Cerner Millennium patient administration system and maternity module later this year.

The trust implemented the first phase of its electronic patient record programme – electronic ordering and results reporting for pathology and radiology – in August 2011.

Cerner’s Millennium is being deployed at Imperial as part of the National Programme for IT in the NHS and an update on the project was presented to the board last Wednesday.

It says the implementation of a new PAS impacts on all parts of the organisation and it is being treated as a clinical transformation programme rather than an IT project.

Development of the functionality for clinical documentation and electronic prescribing is being developed alongside the PAS and maternity functionality and will be rolled-out on an incremental basis once these have bedded in.

Imperial says that with the PAS and maternity in place, it will have the key components of an EPR and a firm foundation on which to develop additional functionality to support more specialised applications.

The report says there has been very good clinical adoption of Cerner’s order communications system, which processes around 2.4m results per month.

A number of clinically-led steering groups are ensuring end-user engagement in the next phase of the programme.

Design decisions are signed off by the Clinical Advisory Board to the Cerner programme, chaired by consultant anaesthetist and clinical lead for IT Sanjay Gautama.

Phase one involves migrating data from the existing PAS to Cerner. The report says the trust has been doing a series of trial loads and had a number of anticipated challenges with historic data that need to be addressed.

Imperial will be the first trust to implement a new reporting solution from Cerner based on its Power Insight Enterprise Data Warehouse, which needs full testing.

The trust is also interested in linking foetal monitors into the system, but says these will not be available at go-live.

The report says Imperial has not yet set a go-live date as evidence from elsewhere shows that premature go-lives can have “significant adverse consequences.”

The go-live date will therefore be set 16-weeks prior to the planned deployment to allow for training needs.