Summer Cerner go-live for Lewisham

Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust will go-live with its Cerner Millennium electronic patient record system at Queen Elizabeth Hospital this summer.

The hospital had been due to go live in its A&E department at the end of March, replacing its legacy Star patient administration system from McKesson.

However, EHI reported shortly before that date that the go-live was being delayed due to problems in transferring 18-week referral to treatment patient data.

The go-live has now been pushed back to an unspecified date in summer while it deals with problems transferring data to the new system.

A trust spokesperson told EHI: “The new electronic patient records system at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital will be going live in summer. We delayed the project due to problems transferring RTT data.  We now have a robust plan to resolve this issue.”

The minutes from Lewisham’s board meeting in March say early indications are that the new go-live date is most likely to be sometime in June, with the delay allowing two further data migration trials to take place.

The minutes say that all partners are “working positively towards a revised deployment date”.

McKesson has agreed to extend its contract for the existing system for up to 12 months, based on existing costs, while the impact on the wider IT programme is still being assessed.

Trust board papers show the £1.4m capital budget for the programme in the last financial year had already been exceeded before the year’s end, with nearly £1.5m in commitments at the 10-month stage.

Board members asked about the impact of the delay on staff morale and clinical engagement, and were told that while the EPR team is very disappointed, clinical engagement remains positive.

The new EPR will include a patient administration system, maternity, A&E, theatres, electronic discharge summaries, order communications and results reporting.

Trust board papers say the main risk with the Queen Elizabeth deployment are problems with the RTT data and their potential “domino effect” on downstream activities.

The trust is also implementing Millennium at University Hospital Lewisham, with the go-live scheduled for the end of October.

The trust has indicated in board papers that it could be stretched due to its potential inability to manage two Cerner deployments across two sites, with a lack of resources and the financial strain from the Queen Elizabeth delay cited as key factors.

According to the March minutes, board members asked if the University Hospital Lewisham deployment could have similar problems with data transferral.

They were told that the starting point there was different as RTT data was not tracked on the patient administration system, while the lessons learned from Queen Elizabeth were “being looked into”.

A Cerner spokesperson said: “Cerner is continuing to work closely with Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust to assist with the migration of the trust’s existing data to the new system.

“New system deployments are complex projects that are dependent upon good data quality to maintain care standards.  We are therefore committed to helping the trust through this stage and look forward to the benefits that the new system will deliver for clinicians and patients.

“These include new abilities for clinicians to rapidly access information about their patients, and improved communication with GPs through electronic discharge summaries.”