Walsall Healthcare switches to System C in IT shake-up

Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust has signed System C to replace its patient administrative system (PAS) with a fully-integrated Medway solution.

System C has said it will deliver an integrated clinical and administration system based on its Medway product line, replacing the current Lorenzo system supplied by DXC Technology.

Several other clinical and departmental systems will also be upgraded or replaced with Medway products under the 10-year contract, including the trust’s emergency department (ED) mobile, patient kiosks and business intelligence, e-observations and theatre management systems.

These will all go live over the next 12 months.

Dr Muhammad Shabab Javed, CCIO and consultant at Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust, said: “We are excited to get started. We have high aspirations for digital transformation and System C has a solid and proven digital framework to fulfil the trust’s plans.”

Walsall Healthcare is in the process of developing an integrated health and care record for the local population through the new Walsall Together Partnership.

Following the launch of the Medway PAS, the trust will be able to access a single master patient index that will be integrated with other clinical systems using System C’s Medway’s Patient Flow system.

Daren Fradgley, director of strategy and improvement for Walsall Healthcare, said the trust had conducted a survey to find out staff satisfaction with hospital IT systems.

The contract was subsequently awarded to System C following “a competitive tender process.”

Fradgley said: “The staff told us they were ready for a change and would happily embrace new technologies that the market has to offer. This gave us the mandate for change and since then the clinical voice has been very strong.”

“We selected System C because their products are really high quality, because their blueprint gives us a clear route towards a full EPR and because they have a strong and clear approach to genuine partnership,” Fradgley added.

“It was really important that we selected a technology partner that had a proven track-record successful deployments.”

Walsall Healthcare has been a Lorenzo trust since 2014, when DXC Technology – then CSC – was the was the local service provider for the North, Midlands and East of England under the National Programme for IT.

The implementation involved moving two legacy patient administration systems over to Lorenzo, and was met with numerous teething issues.

Alongside the new PAS, e-observations at Walsall Healthcare will be upgraded to cover all beds with additional modules, which will be integrated with Medway and other clinical systems. Nurses will be able to update bed states automatically from the e-observations system as a result, with observations embedded into other clinical systems.

The current Ormis theatre management system, also supplied by DXC, will be replaced with solutions by System C and Bluespier.

Markus Bolton, joint chief executive of System C, said: “Walsall is an ambitious Trust with lots of energy and we are delighted to have been selected as their partner in this project.”

In April 2018, Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust announced that it would cease to be a Lorenzo trust in 2020 after signing System C as its new EPR supplier.