Lewisham live with Cerner

Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust has gone live with its Cerner Millennium electronic patient record system at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, after a “total overhaul” of its data migration strategy.

However, the trust is now pushing back its planned implementation of Millennium at University Hospital Lewisham from November to “early 2015” to avoid stretching its resources.

According to the minutes from the trust board’s June meeting, the deferred date will result in increased costs of about £850,000.

Queen Elizabeth 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 time patient data.

A trust spokesman told EHI the hospital went live with its A&E and maternity modules on 6 July.

The day after, the rest of the hospital deployed the patient administration system, theatres, order communications and results reporting, clinical noting and e-discharge modules.

The spokesman said the trust’s data migration strategy was “totally overhauled” after issues with RTT data identified during the full dress rehearsal for the go-live, and the data migration finished one hour ahead of schedule.

A report on the EPR programme at Queen Elizabeth Hospital from the trust’s July board meeting says a full dress rehearsal was successfully completed in mid-June, with “valuable lessons learnt” and no issues reported on the migrated data, including RTT.

A separate progress report on University Hospital Lewisham says the planned November go-live date was delayed due to the impact of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital go-live on trust resources.

The report says a revised plan has been presented to the EPR programme board with a February 2015 deployment date, with a final decision subject to further review of operational risks.

The trust spokesman told EHI the Lewisham go-live is planned for “early 2015”.

A Cerner spokeperson told EHI: “The recent go-live at Queen Elizabeth hospital is one of several steps on the mission to improve clinical, operational and financial outcomes that we continue to work on together, and which will result in improved healthcare for their community.”

Ahead of the deployment, the trust used Avoca Systems, a data migration company in order to migrate the data to the Millennium PAS.

Files such as patient waiting lists, RTT and the master patient index were migrated across from the legacy system, and the company also removed out of date records.

Julie Waters, operations manager at Avoca, explained the change in migration policy.

"Extraction is always a problem and although McKesson provided standard extracts these are hierarchical; which are not suitable for migration,” she said.

“We had overcome this on prior projects by developing a tool specifically for McKesson extracts. We used this at Lewisham to quickly transform these extracts into a set of relational text files for migration, thus reducing the overall transformation timeline.”

Queen Elizabeth Hospital was due to get the Cerner system delivered by BT under the London National Programme for IT contract with South London Healthcare NHS Trust.

In January 2013, the government announced that South London Healthcare would be dissolved. The trust said at the time this would not affect plans to implement Millennium, but a planned go-live of the EPR last year did not go ahead.

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital has since merged with Lewisham Healthcare NHS Trust, which was also planning to implement Millennium under a separate contract.