Buckinghamshire goes live with Cerner

Tags: Cerner CfH Fujitsu Maternity Millennium PAS South

27 Sep 2006

Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS Trust has become the third NHS trust in the South of England to begin to use clinical software from Cerner under the £12.4bn National Programme for IT.

The Amersham and Wycombe Hospitals, Chalfont & Gerrards Cross Hospital and Marlow Cottage Hospital all went live at eight yesterday morning, after a day of further testing to ensure the Millennium system was ready for implementation.

Jan Wood, head of the IM&T modernisation programme across Buckinghamshire, told E-Health Insider: “I can confirm that we did go live across two PCTs and one acute trust in Buckinghamshire this morning and it’s been a case of so far, so good.”

The trust is the first in the Southern cluster to use the maternity software component of the system and Wood said that has been a success.

“Our maternity ward is pleased with the new software and so far that’s going well as well. We have been training our staff on the new system since the beginning of summer and the transition has been smooth today,”

A spokesperson for Fujitsu said: “The system is working smoothly across all the areas that were formerly using the old IRC PAS and the response from users who are getting used to the new system has been positive.”

CfH added in a statement: “The South Bucks deployment family are utilising the PAS, Maternity and Scheduling functionality of R0. Initial indications are that it is working smoothly (across all the areas that were formerly using the old PAS).”

The implementation was delayed for one month, EHI understands. However, the trust said this worked in its favour, as the implementation team were able to review and learn from the teething problems at Weston and the difficulties suffered by Nuffield.

Wood confirmed to EHI that Buckinghamshire will be the first trust to join a regional domain and Milton Keynes should be joining the area’s domain soon.

“We have allowed more time for end to end testing of the Cerner software and to integrate the lessons learnt from the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre late last year and Weston’s implementation at the end of July and we now hope to see Milton Keynes joining us soon.”

A spokesperson for Milton Keynes told EHI: “In order to allow sufficient time for the BHT implementation to ‘bed in’ and allow for redeployment of staff, the overall CFH project plan requires a minimum of two weeks between each go-live date. To allow for this gap, it is intended the MK system will now go live early to mid-October.”

Wood said that despite initial teething problems the transition has been a success: “I think it’s wonderful. It’s been a while coming, but everyone involved with the project has greeted it with excitement, especially at the prospect of information being recorded faster and administration being made easier for all our staff.”

Fujitsu added: “We are thrilled with the implementation of the system, especially as we have had our first baby born and registered using the Cerner system. We hope to be able to implement more systems across the South on the back of this success. ”

Third pea out of the first pod - or is it?

27 Sep 06 21:16

Congratulations to Fujitsu on implementing another system. Having had a few years of reading clever spin on such matters, I now look carefully at the exact words used by "spokesmen". I wonder what "implementation" in the context of this article actually means. “The system is working smoothly across all the areas that were formerly using the old IRC PAS.." could mean that the Cerner system is fully implemented or it could mean that old PAS has been replaced by Cerner PAS functionality. I wonder how much progress has been made with the full implementation of the "clinicals" element of the Cerner system? Perhaps someone close to the project would care to comment and confirm or otherwise is this element of the implementation is also like "shelling peas"?

Release 0

29 Sep 06 18:12

Not that close to this specific project, but Release 0 does little for clinicians in the Southern Cluster, and we're wondering what the future releases really deliver too.

A giant leap backwards

02 Oct 06 14:04

"Release 0 does little for clinicians in the Southern Cluster, and we're wondering what the future releases really deliver too."

This is what is so soul destroying about the programme. Instead of concentrating on implementing good clinical systems, the money has all been poured on re-working hospital administration systems, and replacing these with underdeveloped versions.

For all the enthusiastic clincial time spent trying to teach FJA, IDX and now Cerner what is needed, one gets a feeling that all we're going to get is what they had already developed, further constrained by lots of compromise 'rulings' on cluster standardisation.

No mention of A&E in the article. Or electronic requesting. Seems we have to destroy all existing progress before we can move forwards.

In this case the problem is not the suppliers

03 Oct 06 10:09

The Cerner product can provide extremely useful clinical functionality. In fact the Cerner (and IDX before it) prides itself on the quality of its clinical functionality and both US companies admit that the UK PAS requirements don't come naturally to them - why should they as they are US based systems?

Cerner implemented their clinical functionality on top of the old IRC PAS at Chase Farm and it could be interfaced to a number of other PASs and as we know there are some reasonable working ones still supported and doing what they are good at meeting the UK requirements.

The story is the same in the Northern clusters where iSOFT's i.CM is a very good order comms/results reporting which provide immediate clinical benefits, as proved in the sites that already use it, but again the focus is on replacing PAS's where it need not be.

The inflexibility of having to start with a PAS replacement is coming from Connecting for Health, which is rigidly adhering to an approach which is unnecessary and as a result is not achieving the short to medium term clinical benefits it could.