Kingston hits go-live date with Cerner

Tags: A US

01 Dec 2009

Kingston Hospital NHS Trust has confirmed that it has gone live with its Cerner Millennium Care Records Service (CRS) programme.

E-Health Insider can exclusively reveal that the trust switched from its iSoft CliniCom Patient Administration System (PAS) to the new Cerner system at the weekend with “different areas coming up on stream” over Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The final functionality went live yesterday morning in the outpatients department.

In a statement provided by the trust to EHI, Katie Grimes Kingston’s chief executive, said: “The escalation process, with the different layers of support, seems to be working.

“Our CRS Command Centre is a hive of activity with the teams there solving minor technical glitches with the transfer of data between our old PAS and CRS. Many of the issues are simply the nerves of the first few hours of using the system, which is exactly what we predicted and planned for.”

Kingston is the first hospital to go-live with the US system in 18 months after serious complications occurred after its implementation at the Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust.

Grimes said: “It’s early days but so far I am just so pleased and impressed. Staff have remained calm and professional and are very positive about CRS, with some already extolling the benefits of the new system.”

The trust added that patients are responding well and are being informed about what is going on.

“We’ve taken time to ensure that they know we are doing something new, and explaining that it might take us a little longer to get to grips with the new system.

“There have been some queues, but no more so than on a really busy day in the hospital. We’ve had staff out talking to patients, handing out letters and flyers with information on them – and a free cup of tea!” Grimes said.

The hospital went live on the final day of November, the very latest that director general of informatics, Christine Connelly, said that Local Service Providers (LSP) BT and CSC were given to make “significant process” with their strategic systems under the National Programme for IT.

In April, she said that she wanted LSP CSC to roll out the electronic patient record from iSoft in any care-setting and BT to implement Cerner Millennium in an acute care setting by the end of November 2009.

At the beginning of November, Connecting for Health published the criteria, which the success of the deployments will be based on, and the outcome of the assessment is expected towards the end of December.

Grimes added: “We won’t know if it’s been a success for a few months but we have a set of criteria by which we will judge progress over the next few weeks. It’s been a night and day project for quite some time and we are all delighted CRS is finally here.”

Link: Cerner

Sarah Bruce

Readers Comments

Well done Kingston

01 Dec 09 18:01

Some good news - if this report is taken at face value. Of course there will no doubt be the usual 'far too late and far too expensive' brigade of posters - but I for one would like to say 'well done' to all involved - including Trust staff, suppliers, LPfIT / CfH and the LSP. And my fingers are firmly crossed that Kingston do NOT experience any of the severe operational / reporting problems that bedevilled earlier deployments. The next few weeks will be interesting.

Is it St George's next ?

A robust solution and a delivery model that works?

01 Dec 09 22:53

Newcastle live and no bad news; closely followed by a cautious declaration of success at Kingston. It is still early days, but the local implementation approach on the 2007 codebase may just be the robust deployment model on a product operating at scale that the NHS has been striving for...

Let's hope that the changing political landscape does not throw it all back up into the air, and grasp defeat from the jaws of victory!

Cost and benefits

02 Dec 09 10:43

It will be interesting to see the figures when (if) they are released so we can see what it costs to run this new system compared to the old one, and what benefits the patient will see thanks to the brave new world of hospital IT!

Let's hope, for the sake of the people of Kingston, that waiting times decrease and the quality of outcomes improves - all helped by the reduced costs of running the hospital thanks to Cerner.

Or am I misunderstanding the reasons for all this?

Cerner not all that it seems

03 Dec 09 09:27

I have spent a lot of time working on the Cerner product and I would say that it may well be possible to make it go live relatively safely, but it is a long way off from being the sort of System that the NHS needs or deserves. And to the previous poster, I have heard that the Newcastle deployment may not be quite the success that you think.

How about giving ehealth insider a no holds barred site visit to Newcastle so we can see how well it is really going? The sooner we stop worrying about getting more sites live and start making the Cerner product better to use for the trusts that have it already the better in my view.

Not as bad as we thought

sjrickaby@vodafone.net

03 Dec 09 21:48

I'm a member the team that helped deploy Millennium within the Radiology Department at Kingston, and I must admit the initial deployment has been better than expected. Yes there have been some major teething problems but there does not seem to have been any major impact on patient care, so far.

The main success factor seems to be staff engagement. The areas within the hospital where the staff have been fully engaged with the deployment have been the areas that adapted quickly. On the other hand, there were departments that ground to a halt because the staff appeared to know nothing about the project.

However, I would say that Millennium looks and feels more like Windows 3.1 rather than a software environment that will see the NHS through the second decade of the 21st Century.

Millennium equals Win98 code

04 Dec 09 11:45

The name of the software gives you a clue to its age,

Under the hood its Win 98 code, hence the limited naming convention, some modules, mostly the clinical ones are newer code, but these are rarely adopted.

The same company (Cerner) also wrote (bespoke this time)

Choose and Book, compare them side by side to see things should have progressed.