Medway PAS trouble for Barking

Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust has paused all further go-lives of its Medway modules due to trouble with the patient administration system after going live despite being aware of “outstanding issues”.

The trust implemented the PAS from System C, a McKesson company in December 2013; only seven months after announcing the contract win.

A paper, presented to the trust’s board meeting earlier this month, says that the trust has paused the go-lives of the Medway maternity, A&E and order communications modules while it stabilises the PAS.

“Due to extremely tight timescales, the system went live with a known large number of outstanding issues remaining unresolved, effectively before user acceptance testing had been completed, but the trust did give the go-ahead to deploy,” says the paper.

The reason for the go-live happening before the trust was effectively ready was, according to the paper, because “System C could only undertake a deployment in December 2013 due to commitments to other trusts.”

System C has won a lot of business in the past year, as the support contracts for the legacy Star and Totalcare PAS systems, also McKesson owned, expired at the end of March this year.

EHI reported in March that 12 of the 26 trusts chose to replace the legacy systems with Medway, but that half of all trusts using the old systems failed to deploy a new PAS by the deadline and McKesson has offered an extension of the support contract to those trusts.

Barking, Havering and Redbridge’s IT team proposed to the May board that the trust pauses the Medway A&E deployment and continue to use its existing Symphony system from Ascribe.

It also wants to pause its Medway Maternity deployment and use its existing E3 system from EuroKing, and pausethe roll-out ts order communications module until the core PAS is stable.

According to the board paper, there are also outstanding issues with the business intelligence product.

“The trust has contracted for a managed service and as such is prevented access to the operational database. The trust has instead been provided with the BI software which extracts from the database, analyses it and presents it for reporting,” says the paper.  

This brings further problems as there are underlying issues such as referral to treatment reporting “is not adequate as the relationship between Medway PAS and BI does correctly calculate RTT pathway status and waiting times.”

In a joint statement, the trust and System C, told EHI: “The Trust and McKesson System C have worked in partnership to deploy a major modernisation project to replace an old PAS system. 

“Many of these issues were identified from the outset and Barking, Havering and Redbridge and McKesson System C are committed to working together to ensure that the remaining issues are addressed speedily so that the trust is able to obtain the anticipated benefits from the system. “

Another major issue for the trust has been data quality. The trust board paper says there were pre-existing data quality issues which have now been carried over to Medway and the Medway system “does not recognise some of the rules previously applied” and there are some errors in the rules applied by the system.

The trust’s IT team has recommended to the board that a data quality and validation project is implemented to solve this.

The trust and the company added in their joint statement that they are “confident of completing the transition as soon as possible and continue to work together to plan the rollout of the additional modules at the appropriate stage.”

“Our absolute priority is making sure the new system meets the requirements of the trust to enable the delivery of excellent patient care.”