Doncaster and Bassetlaw PAS delays cost £1.1m

A delay in the implementation of a patient administration system at a northern trust had cost more than a million pounds.

Doncaster and Bassetlaw Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which has one of the busiest emergency departments in the country, delayed its go-live of Ascribe CaMIS’ PAS for more than a year.

The total budget for replacing its 26-year-old Totalcare PAS was £7 million, but the “delay in launch” cost an extra £1.1 million, according to the trust’s December board papers.

A further £1.9 million was “required for infrastructure and updating of hardware that was not initially reported to the PAS Board”.

The board papers reported on the CaMIS post implementation review, which was conducted 12 months on from the go-live in October 2015.

David Purdue, the trust’s chief operating officer, told Digital Health News that user readiness was the big challenge during the PAS implementation.

“Business readiness was the biggest challenge we faced.”

Purdue said that “one of the key things for us was getting that training right and we probably didn’t do it as well as we should have done”.

There were also difficulties accessing medical records when CaMIS was first implemented, forcing staff into work-arounds rather than correctly using the new system, Purdue said.

However, there were some successes, with the new PAS retaining all reporting and “a significant investment into ensuring all the data quality was up to scratch before we went live”, he said.

In the notes accompanying the review, seen by Digital Health News, it said the “overall result of migration was excellent”.

“Although there were operational issues, and it would expected in a project of this size, the trust overall managed to continue to function with no risks to patients.”

The PAS implementation was part of Doncaster’s iHospital programme to create a full electronic patient record supporting a ‘paper-lite’ hospital.

To help achieve this plan, the trust received £6 million from NHS England’s ‘Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards: Technology Fund’ in 2013.

The trust serves a population of about 420,000 across south Yorkshire, north Nottinghamshire and the surrounding areas.

Digital Health Intelligence: holds information on the clinical systems installed at trusts across the UK and uses this to calculate a Clinical Digital Maturity Index score. Doncaster and Bassetlaw Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust ranks 78 out of 153, with a score of 73. (requires log-in).