Medway picks a PAS

Medway NHS Foundation Trust has chosen Oasis Medical Solutions as preferred supplier for its patient administration system.

The trust, which will soon merge with Dartford and Gravesham NHS Foundation Trust, runs the legacy McKesson Totalcare PAS, which it needs to replace before central support for the system expires next year.

Medway submitted its business case for the merged trust to buy Oasis to the board yesterday.

“The new North Kent Trust will need a single PAS to drive clinical and operational efficiencies,” says the business case.

“The two trusts have worked collaboratively on the PAS procurement, to ensure the chosen solution meets the requirements of the new combined trust.”

Medway plans to go-live on 3 March 2014. However, the business case adds that as Dartford and Gravesham’s PatientCentre PAS from CSC does not expire until 2017, it may not deploy until 2015.

The implementation of Oasis will include A&E, order communications and results reporting, as the trust wants a “tightly integrated” system.

“The opportunity to resolve multiple separate systems into a coherent integrated platform also offers the prospect of providing a higher standard of patient care through the provision of real-time data capture and systems integration,” says the business case.

The PAS replacement project also covers a new integration engine to replace the trust’s eGate system. However, to minimise delays in the PAS implementation, this replacement will not take place until after the initial go-live.

The support contract for Totalcare was signed in 2006 and enabled 26 trusts in England to keep or deploy the PAS until an NPFiT system became available.

In 2010, when it became clear that the future of CSC’s local service provider contract under NPfIT was in jeopardy, NHS Connecting for Health extended the contract until March 2014.

The trust business case says that the delays with NPfIT mean the trust is on an “extremely tight timescale” to replace its system and failing to do so could leave Medway without a PAS.

“The programme has struggled to deliver the entirety of the original vision and has led to a number of failed attempts to implement a new PAS/EPR in both Medway NHS Foundation Trust and Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust, most recently via the South Acute Programme,” it says.

The trust has recently built a new data centre and has begun a ‘data cleansing’ project which includes increasing NHS number coverage, checking for duplicates and tidying up default entries to improve data quality ahead of its PAS deployment.

Medway is also due to go-live with its new picture archiving and communications system from GE Healthcare, shortly.