BT announces first RiO in South

Tags: A Cerner CSE Healthcare Millennium RiO

23 Dec 2009

BT has announced its first deployment of the RiO community and mental health system in the South of England.

Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust has become the first to go live with the system as part of the additional contract that BT was awarded under the National Programme for IT in the NHS in April this year.

When the system is fully rolled out, it will be used by around 3,000 people across the trust’s mental heath, learning disability and drug and alcohol services, which serve more than 1.3m people.

Fiona Edwards, trust chief executive, said: “This is the culmination of a lot of hard work and determination by skilled and committed staff from Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, BT and its supplier, CSE Healthcare Systems.

"Our staff work across multiple care settings and geographically dispersed sites, but we will now have accurate, up to date information that is quickly and securely accessible.”

RiO has in many cases replaced paper-based systems and covers a range of clinical and administrative functions. It enables staff to access electronic case records, allocate, share and reassign caseloads and record treatments.

The trust has implemented the latest version of RiO, which provides single sign on using a smartcard, access to the NHS patient demographic details and access to Choose and Book.

During the summer, RiO upgrades in London were put on hold after a series of performance issues meant that trusts were experiencing very slow response times and patient data was not being reliably saved by the system.

The upgrades resumed in September and according to BT, the roll-out of RiO in London is more than 80% complete and is in use by more than 40,000 healthcare professionals.

Sir Jonathan Michael, managing director of BT Health, said: “Going live at Surrey and Borders represents a significant milestone for BT, the trust and the national programme.

“As the first trust to go live since BT's contract was extended to cover deployment in the South of England, it demonstrates how the national programme in the South is gathering momentum.”

BT will be paid £546m to install RiO in 25 mental and community health sites in the South, to support the ‘Live8’ acute trusts that installed Cerner Millennium before former LSP Fujitsu left the programme, and to put Cerner into four more acute trusts.

Link: BT Health

Sarah Bruce

RiO upgrades restart in London (29 Sep 2009) (1)

Readers Comments

Well Done to Simon

alan.brown@apira.co.uk

23 Dec 09 09:16

And special mention to the Project Manager, Simon Martin for managing this implementation so well despite a number of challenges: the first Southern Cluster RiO; on newly implemented rigs from BT; 18 legacy systems to migrate data from; Xmas getting closer; every other Southern Trust watching closely; etc.

Well done Simon and the team.

Cost beneficial?

23 Dec 09 13:37

(This is not at all to detract from a successful go live. All involved in that were using arrangements made by others.)

I know the figures have been mentioned many times before but this article made me re-read them. BT are being paid over £21M per implementation for RiO. And the NHS costs are not only those, they have to include local Trust costs too.

I believe the BT costs alone would have caused a proposal to take RiO to be unsuccessful if any case on this basis had been considered by a Trust, nor that their major commissioners would have allowed it. Is it public how this was judged centrally?

I know the we-have-no-choice brigade will probably come out and comment, and they're right. But just because us on the ground have no choice doesn't mean this shouldn't be scrutinised, publicised and lessons learnt. Though I suspect NPfIT overall is simply too big and costly a cockup to be acknowledged as such by government for many years.

Cost

29 Dec 09 12:10

BT aren't being payed £21m to install each RIO instance. There is also the Cerner costs in the overall figure quoted in the article, and although very few know the exact breakdown, I would imagine Cerner costs make up a large proportion.

Cost beneficial?

29 Dec 09 17:24

I acknowledge the correction in post 3 to my figures in post 2.

Taking the contract cost across all 37 NHS entities, it comes to 'only' £14.75M each. This doesn't make me feel much better because it sounds poor value (out of desperation?). What do you think?

Millions too much

31 Dec 09 20:26

Every NPfIT figure I have seen is maginfied many times the costs that I would expect for a local contract direct with the software supplier. There are important business change processes to do, but these require much NHS managers and staff time, (and a photocopier), not massive consultancy bills.