North Midlands deploys Medway EPR

A Midlands trust has gone live with a new electronic patient record system after migrating millions of records and merging with an existing patient administration system.

The University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust went live with System C’s Medway v4.6 EPR this weekend at the Royal Stoke University Hospital and County Hospital.

Markus Bolton, chief executive of System C, told Digital Health News that it was a “hugely complex go-live at what is a very large and busy trust”. It had “gone very smoothly so far”, he said.

“It has involved replacing a legacy CSC solution with Medway, migrating over 63 million records, and then merging with the Medway PAS already in use on the County Hospital site.”

Bolton said the go-live involved merging the separate master patient indexes at the two hospitals into a single instance.

In addition, the new system was plugged into about 60 third party systems used at the trust, he said.  

Mark Bostock, director of IM&T at trust, said deployment had been “successfully completed and rolled out” at the two hospitals.

“Deploying a system of this breadth at a hospital with multiple sites and over 11,000 staff is a complex task. 7,500 users were trained for the initial go-live.”

The trust had previously raised concerns about the go-live date in its January board papers.

“The key issues considered were largely regarding the necessity for relevant staff to have been trained appropriately ahead of the go-live.”

However, it was decided that there was a “robust” plan in place.

Bostock said that the trust and System C “have a lot of work to do together over the coming months as the system settles and evolves and we look forward to progressing together”.

The trust picked Medway in November 2014, with a five-year contract that included the PAS and integrated clinical modules for order communications, clinical noting, business intelligence and results reporting.

The trust was formed in 2014, following a merger of Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust and University Hospitals of North Staffordshire NHS Trust.

University Hospitals of North Midlands cares for 900,000 people on its two sites, and is a teaching hospital in partnership with Keele University.

Digital Health Intelligence maintains a database of the administrative and clinical systems in use at trusts, and uses this to calculate a clinical digital maturity index score for them. The University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust (log-in required) has a score of 62 and is ranked 124 (out of 153 acute trusts).