Ealing signs PAS deal ahead of merger

Ealing Hospital NHS Trust has signed the contract for its Silverlink patient administration system ahead of its merger with North West London Hospitals NHS Trust.

The trust runs the legacy McKesson Totalcare PAS, the contract for which expires next year. It will replace the system by migrating to the Silverlink PAS already in use at North West London Hospitals.

Kevin Connolly, director of informatics and performance at Ealing and director of ICT at North West London, told EHI that the two trusts aims to go live with the PAS and co-exist on the same database in January 2014, three months before the planned merger.

“A formal hosting agreement, supported by appropriate formal data sharing agreement, will be in place between the two trusts to cover the period up to merger day one,” he said.

“Strategically, this is an interim solution and investment, for a period of up to five years, during which time we will jointly procure our end state strategic solutions.”

The trusts are currently updating a joint IM&T strategy, which is planned for completion and formal approval by the end of September.

Both trusts had their business cases for the PAS approved by their respective boards earlier this year, and the contract was finalised at the end of March.

Connolly said the goal was to standardise and integrate the systems at the two trusts and continue with joint procurements.

“The project also includes interface migration via a jointly procured InterSystems Ensemble integration engine,” he added.

Ealing Hospital has also signed a contract with Stalis to lead on data migration and provision of an archive solution for all of the data currently held on the Totalcare PAS.

“In terms of planned benefits, the unified PAS and common integration engine provide the platform thereafter for standardising other departmental clinical systems across the two trusts,” said Connolly.

“This will include common procurement of new systems for both trusts, such as radiology, where both trusts have expiring PACS/RIS contracts in 2014-15.”

He added: “Also, whilst there is considerable effort and resource involved in migrating Ealing Hospital onto the North West London Hospitals PAS, this will be a valuable investment in easing the future migration to the ‘end state’ EPR solution for the merged organisation.”

The merging project, called “stronger together”, submitted a business case to NHS London in October last year, but it was not approved.

It has now been deferred while the trusts revise the clinical model and financial planning, and the two trusts hope to submit a revised full business case this autumn and a go-live date for the merger is set for 1 April 2014.