Southport and Ormskirk live with Medway

Southport and Ormskirk Hospital NHS Trust went live with its Medway patient administration system from System C last weekend.

The trust, which previously ran the legacy McKesson Totalcare PAS, signed the contract for the new system in October last year.

Robert Gillies, Southport and Ormskirk’s executive medical director said the ten-month deployment has been a “major achievement”.

“We are very pleased to have such a smooth go-live. We undertook this project knowing that it was going to involve a massive amount of change for us – we had been using our old Totalcare system for 25 years”, he said.

The support contract for the old Totalcare system expired in March this year, but the trust has been provided with limited extended support since the contract ended.

After migrating 18.7m records from Totalcare to Medway, the trust went live with the PAS, A&E and business intelligence modules.

“System C has worked very closely with us in managing the change process and over the coming months and years we will be working together to make sure we get maximum benefit out of the opportunities offered by Medway,” said Gillies.

The go-live is the eighteenth deployment the company has completed in the past two years. Markus Bolton, chief executive of System C, said that every go-live “is a major project and a huge responsibility for us.”

“Moving a trust to a new PAS/EPR is an enormously complex task because so many users are involved and the move requires changes to processes across all areas of a trust’s operations,” he said.  

“We’re really pleased that Southport and Ormskirk has been so successful.  That success is a tribute to the great team effort and to the experience we’ve built up over these last two years.”  

Southport and Ormskirk runs two district hospitals as well as many community sites and the trust told EHI last year that it hopes the new system will improve integrated care.