South London Cerner go-live delayed

The go-live of Cerner Millennium at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital has been delayed until March next year.

The hospital is due to get the electronic patient record system delivered by BT under the London NPfIT contract with South London Healthcare NHS Trust.

In January, the government announced that South London Healthcare will be dissolved by October 2013, but the trust said at the time that this would not delay plans to deploy Millennium.

However, a go-live planned for early this year did not go ahead and a start date of March 2014 now looks likely.

Queen Elizabeth Hospital is due to be taken over by Lewisham Healthcare NHS Trust, which in April announced its plans to implement the Millennium EPR under a separate contract.

Lewisham’s ‘QEH Integration Planning Update’ for July says the IT agenda remains challenging with uncertainty regarding the South London plan for ‘go-live’ with Cerner on the Queen Elizabeth site.

“Agreement on a ‘go-live’ date is yet to be reached. LPfIT are now conducting an options appraisal on the possible dates for QEH go-live, but a start date of March 2014 looks most likely with significant implications for the future implementation and the Lewisham EPR project,” it says.

“Over the next two weeks the SLHT resources available for Cerner deployment will be assessed as this will be a prerequisite for a successful deployment.”

Lewisham’s board papers also give an update on its own EPR project. The May 2013 finance report says the capital set aside for Cerner implementation in this financial year is £4m.

June board minutes add that work with Cerner started on 1 May and good progress is being made.

The programme will use Cerner’s MethodM deployment approach and is currently at the ‘vision’ stage, the papers say.

The initial system review will begin this month. Key risks include the lack of organisational capacity while merging with QEH.

The Director of IT reported that the first set of data would be extracted in around six months’ time and that external specialist support will be employed for the data migration.

Lewisham has not given a go-live date for Millennium.