Brighton on Alert in A&E

Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust has gone live with the Alert electronic patient record system in its Princess Royal Hospital – six months later than originally planned.

The trust deployed the system at the Haywards Heath hospital’s A&E department on 14 October.

It went live with the EPR in the A&E department of the Sussex Eye Hospital on its Brighton campus last November.

But EPR programme board minutes at the time revealed that it was “touch and go” because of several ‘severity one’ issues.

The trust was originally scheduled to go live in Princess Royal in April, but the deployment was delayed due to issues with internal pathology and reporting components.

Judith Steen, Brighton’s EPR programme manager, told EHI the trust had to “carefully design and test” data extract reports and further develop the interface between Alert and its own laboratory system for pathology.

The issues also led Brighton to revise its deployment of the Alert EPR to focus on “a core set of functionality” for outpatients and inpatients clinics.

Steen said the go-live at Princess Royal had gone well, with the programme team focussing on ensuring the transition to a new system remains smooth.

“We’re just filling all the normal processes in, logging issues and letting the whole department just bed down.”

Steen said a support team is on duty 24/7 to support staff through the first few weeks post-implementation as they become used to using Alert.

“Because we’re on rotating shifts, every time someone new comes in it’s almost like a mini-go-live all over again.”

She said the trust had dealt with the data extract reports, but is monitoring them as live data goes in and making adjustments to ensure they are correct.

For pathology, the trust had decided to initially implement only Alert’s electronic test ordering, retaining its existing process for viewing results.

Steen said the A&E department at Royal Sussex County Hospital, which is also part of the Brighton campus, will go live with Alert sometime in spring next year, once it is bedded in at Princess Royal.

The trust is also looking to roll out Alert’s outpatient module to further clinics after an “early adopter” elderly outpatient clinic at Royal Sussex County went live with it in July.

Beki Ruban, Alert’s UK director of operations and business development, said the company has worked closely with the trust to ensure the go-live is a success.

“We are very pleased to see the way in which the solution has been welcomed and is being used in the department by all professionals.

“Seeing our solution supporting the way in which professionals work and, most importantly, supporting patient care, are the most rewarding parts of our jobs.”

Ruban said the company is actively working with the trust on the next phases of the programme to roll out the EPR across the rest of the organisation.

In September, Brighton declared a major incident after it lost access to clinical IT systems and was forced to re-route ambulances to other hospitals.

The trust said it was recreating the crash in a lab environment to determine what exactly went wrong.