Open source EHR live at Taunton

An open source electronic patient record system has gone live across an NHS acute trust for the first time today.

Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust has become the first to roll-out the open source EPR openMAXIMS. It is live with IMS Maxims’ open source patient administration system as well as A&E, theatres and reporting modules.

Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has also gone live today with CSC’s Lorenzo electronic patient record.

Digital Health News reported in March 2014 that Taunton had picked IMS Maxims as preferred bidder to supply an EPR to replace its Cerner Millennium system.

Its national contract for Millennium expires this October. It was planning to go-live with openMAXIMS in May this year, but this was delayed until September.

An EPR update presented to Taunton’s board this month says additional support during the go-live weekend and over the following two weeks includes 27 external floor walkers, 200 members of staff acting as ‘super users’ and a joint command and incident management centre in operation 24 hours a day.

The report highlights the risks association with data migration from Cerner into MAXIMS. It said seven trial loads showed very low error levels, but some corrective work was required before going live with outpatients.

The trust also identified an increased risk of problems with the new NHS e-Referral system as the “delivery of (e-Referrals) was received much later than planned” meaning links could not be tested.

The report adds that more than 75% of staff have been trained on the system, including all consultants.

Sheffield Teaching Hospitals agreed to take Lorenzo in October 2014, with board papers suggesting the full cost of deploying and running the system over 10 years will be around £33 million.

To support the purchase of the system, Sheffield is making use of central funding from the Department of Health, which is available to trusts in the North, Midlands and East of England that are able to provide a business case for the implementation of Lorenzo.

As confirmed by a Freedom of Information request made by Digital Health News this summer, the DH approved the maximum available support package of £3.1 million for Sheffield Teaching Hospitals.

The DH pays additional costs directly to CSC for both deployment charges and services charges. Sheffield has previously said it was seeking a total of £13m in funding from the DH.

Dr David Throssell, Medical Director, Sheffield Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said: "Thanks to the incredible efforts of all our staff, we went live with the first phase of our new electronic patient record system yesterday. The switch over from Patient Centre to the Lorenzo EPR has gone well and we also have our new electronic white boards functioning on all our admitting wards.

"However this is the very first step in our journey and so we will be using the next few weeks as a settling in period to address any changes we may want to make before looking at how we can exploit the benefits of the new system for patients and staff. "

The decision to install Lorenzo is part of the trust’s five-year 'Transformation through Technology' programme to overhaul its clinical systems, which were centred around the Patient Centre patient administration system from CSC.

Other developments as part of the programme include the use of Restore’s CCube as the trust’s electronic document management system to scan millions of historical patient notes.

The trust is also working on the introduction of a clinical portal to pull data from the existing 280 computer systems into a bespoke clinical view with a single sign-on.

Infrastructure services are provided by ANS Group and its FlexPod solution for integrated computing, networking and storage.