BT completes deals for 25 RiO sites

Tags: Bristol BT CfH London RiO

07 Jul 2010

BT has finalised the contracts for the 25 RiO sites across the South of England that formed part of the extended contract that it signed with NHS Connecting for Health last year.

The £546m deal, which the company signed in June 2009, covered 25 installations of RiO in mental health and community settings.

It also included support for the ‘Live8’ acute trusts that installed Cerner Millennium before Fujitsu left the National Programme for IT in the NHS in 2008, and putting Cerner into four more acute trusts.

Jill de Bene, delivery director for RiO in the South, told E-Health Insider: “There have been a lot of enthusiastic trusts signing up.

"Twenty two were signed in the last quarter of last year. The last three have just come on board, with many of them saying that felt like they had been on starting blocks.”

Fifteen sites have already gone live with the system, which is provided and developed by CSE Healthcare Systems, while the remaining ten sites will go live over the next ten months.

Andy Kinnear, head of Avon IM&T Consortium, who oversaw the deployment of RiO at NHS South Gloucestershire, NHS North Somerset and NHS Bristol simultaneously this spring told E-Health Insider: “Deploying RiO is the first step in a much longer journey.

"I can only equate it to the journey of GPs who started with low level ICT 20 years ago, and who now have mature and developed systems. RiO is already some way along that journey already.”

More than 800 users across the Bristol primary care trusts are now using RiO to provide a single patient record as well as single sign-on, access to the NHS Personal Demographics Service and access to Choose and Book.

The consortium will complete the roll-out to an additional 1,200 users across nursing services by the end of the year.

Kinnear added: “BT had a really positive attitude. They were confident that the product works, following deployment in London, but weren’t over confident.

"They understood that you can’t just drag and drop a product and that Bristol is different to London.”

All of the RiO sites in the south are live with V.5 of the software. However, they will be part of a national upgrade on 23 August, which will see them migrate to V5.4.

De Bene added: “We’re constantly improving the product and there are a couple more releases.

"In release one and two [further releases] there is greater functionality, including high level case records, case load management, reporting, results, ordering of pathology and prescribing.

"There is also RiO-to-RiO, which will allow one part of a PCT to look in at another part of an organisation with RiO if there is a legitimate reason. It’s very rich functionality.”

Sites live with RiO*:

Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

Berkshire East Primary Care Trust

Dorset Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust

Hampshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

Oxfordshire Primary Care Trust

South Gloucestershire Primary Care Trust

North Somerset Primary Care Trust

2gether NHS Foundation Trust

Bristol Primary Care Trust

Berkshire West Primary Care Trust

Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust

Devon Partnership NHS Trust

Portsmouth City Teaching Primary Care Trust (now known as Solent East PCT) (mental health services)

Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust

Milton Keynes Primary Care Trust (PCT) (mental health services)

Sites that will go-live over the next ten months as part of the deal with BT in the South*:

Ridgeway Partnership (Oxfordshire Learning Disability NHS Trust)

Cornwall Partnership NHS Trust

Portsmouth City Teaching Primary Care Trust (community services)

Surrey Primary Care Trust

Oxford and Buckinghamshire Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust

Buckinghamshire Primary Care Trust

Milton Keynes Primary Care Trust (community services)

Solent West Primary Care Trust

Hampshire Primary Care Trust

Kent and Medway Social Care Partnership NHS Trust

* List supplied by BT. Some organisation names may have changed or be changing to reflect new, national naming conventions or local reorganisations.

Read more about Bristol's plans for shared records in our opinion and analysis, Bellwether.

Link: CSE Healthcare

Sarah Bruce

RiO upgrades restart in London (29 Sep 2009) (1)
BT takes over Cerner sites in the south (02 Apr 2009) (7)

Readers Comments

All good till the last paragraph

09 Jul 10 19:09

"There is also RiO-to-RiO, which will allow one part of a PCT to look in at another part of an organisation with RiO if there is a legitimate reason. It’s very rich functionality.”

Why couldn't they just have one RiO implementation across the whole Trust ?

Must have been something to do with the profits for BT.

The national programme was supposed to be all about joining up records for a local community, and even now, it is more about subdividing and creating data islands because it is more convenient or profitable for suppliers.

I am so sick of the private sector driven strategies, which of course the current administration are even more enamoured by.

Rio is usually one per Trust

ewan@woodcote-consulting.com

12 Jul 10 15:29

I have no brief to defend BT but the comment above does not reflect the facts.

In General there will be one instance of Rio for a Trust so Rio-Rio is only required for information sharing between Trusts.

The only exception might be where one Trust is providing both Mental Health and Community Health Services where there will be one instance for each care setting.

This approach reflects customer requirements, which seem to be reasonable, not the suppliers desire to maximise profits

The mental health version of Rio is very differently configured so it would not make sense to try and share a single instance between care settings.

It might be possible to share a single instance across multiple similar Trusts, but I would argue that optimal configuration and good information governance is best achieved with an instance per Trust

Ewan Davis