Doncaster delays CaMIS go-live

Doncaster and Bassetlaw Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has delayed the go-live of its CaMIS patient administration by more than a year.

The trust had originally intended to go live with Ascribe’s PAS in June 2014 to replace its legacy Totalcare system from McKesson, for which support ended in March last year. However, the deployment was then delayed until the "autumn".

The trust has now confirmed that only a limited part of the PAS is functional and that it will not go fully live until the end of 2015.

Linda Watts, patient administration system lead at the trust, told Digital Health News: “our plans are progressing well for the new patient administration system to go live before the end of December 2015.

“Our current patient administration system has been in place since 1986 and we have taken the decision to spend additional time to make sure we can safely move our patient data onto the new system and to complete robust testing of the new system.”

Board papers from November 2014 give more detail about the decision to delay the go-live, saying there were “challenges around achieving assurance on information reporting”. 

“Some elements had already gone live but the initial timescales for the rest of the system had been reset to ensure full preparedness.

“It had been agreed to duplicate the outputs of the old system for a period of time, as this presented the lowest risk. We would go live only when ready and when confident of data migration and reporting integrity.”

The PAS implementation is 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.

Recent developments as part of this programme include the go-live of the Symphony system in A&E, upgrading the K2 maternity system, implementing iPads in pharmacy and infection prevention control, building a new data centre and improving the IT infrastructure with wireless networks and fibre optic cables.

This year will see the trust progress in several other areas, according to board papers published in April.

Major projects other than the PAS implementation include the introduction of electronic whiteboards, electronic observations, medical records scanning and outpatient self check-in kiosks.

“These projects will transform how we work in the hospital, releasing more time to care and will also improve access for patients to our services,” say the papers.