Lewisham sets out Cerner plans

Lewisham Healthcare NHS Trust plans to go-live with Cerner Millennium in September next year.

EHI reported last August that the south London trust had picked Cerner to supply its Millennium EPR ahead of InterSystems and Cambio.

An EPR progress report to the trust board dated 3 September says the go-live has been pushed back slightly from initial plans, from June 2014 to September.

It says the full Cerner build will be ready next week, with system validation taking place in November. Trial loads will be conducted in December and February, with integration testing also starting in February.

End user training is estimated to start next June, with a full dress rehearsal pencilled in for July. The final go-live will be in a year’s time, on 1 September 2014.

The progress report says the contract with Cerner was signed on 21 March this year and the board has endorsed a decision to start with a two-phase patient administration system deployment.

This is due to the health secretary’s decision to break up the South London Healthcare Trust and merge its Queen Elizabeth Hospital with Lewisham Healthcare.

South London received Millennium under the National Programme for IT and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital is due to go-live with the system around March next year.

The Lewisham EPR project is called iCare2 to align with the branding of the Queen Elizabeth deployment called iCare.

The trust update says its ability to deploy the system while merging with the new hospital is one of the five top risks of the programme. The Queen Elizabeth Hospital deployment is also impacting on the Lewisham programme dates.

Other risks are listed as: Lewisham’s ability to complete phase one deployment prior to the “end of life” of its maternity system; the need to complete phase two deployment of the community module prior to its need to migrate RiO Community from the BT data centre in October 2015; and its ability to deliver cash releasing benefits.

The EPR will include: a patient administration system; order communications and results reporting; e-prescribing and medicines management; clinical documentation; social and medical alerting; care pathway workflow, clinical decision support and clinical analysis tools.

A community clinical and administrative system was an optional module, which the trust has also chosen to deploy.

Lewisham is also procuring a data migration and archive solution. Invitations to tender were sent out on 26 July 2013 and the target date for contract award was this Monday.