London trust goes live with spine-connected PAS

Queen Mary’s Hospital, south-east London, has become the first hospital trust in London to go live with a ‘strategic’ patient administration system (PAS) connected to the national NHS spine.

The implementation marks a genuine milestone for Queen Mary’s Sidcup NHS Trust, the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT); BT, NPfIT’s prime contractor for London; and IDX, BT’s US clinical software sub-contractor.

The system installed at Queen Mary’s is the first acute system connected to the spine using a system specifically written for NPfIT. Though other PAS systems have been installed in other clusters, notably in the North West and West Midlands, they have been implementations of existing legacy systems.

Connecting for Health, the trust and BT all separately confirmed to E-Health Insider that the system had gone live by the 28 November deadline set last month by NHS IT director general, Richard Granger.

According to a BT spokesperson the PAS system went live across the 400 bed Queen Mary’s Hospital on Sunday, together with a module for the accident and emergency department.

The spokesperson confirmed to EHI that the Carecast system was fully connected to the NHS spine – the national infrastructure layer initially being used for patient demographics, user log-in, authentication and role-based access.

In an October interview with financial wire service, Bloomberg, Granger said BT must deliver at Queen Mary’s Sidcup NHS Trust by 28 November or face dire consequences.

"If you’re looking for an event to gauge whether they’ve got their London contract under control, then that’s the one I take,” he said. Granger warned of a "domino effect” with the 42 remaining hospitals in the London area if BT missed the November deadline at Queen Mary’s.

However, this first integrated go-live in London comes at least a year later than had originally been specified in CfH’s contracts. Under the NPfIT deployment plans included in local service provider (LSP) contracts English trusts were meant to start receiving the first releases of the LSPs’ reference solutions by late summer 2004.

By the end of 2005 LSPs were scheduled to have moved on to providing more advanced systems, which in addition to basic patient administration also included clinical tools as order communications and results reporting.

The greatest progress in installing PAS systems is understood to have been made in the North West and West Midlands where sources tell EHI CSC has implemented almost 30 to date in acute, community and mental health trusts, including the Birmingham Children’s Hospital.  All the implementations have been based on iSoft’s existing iPM legacy product.

Accenture is understood to have completed a smaller number of deployments of iPM, together with The Phoenix Partnership’s SystmOne product to deliver PAS functionality to PCTs and mental health trusts.

Despite this progress neither CSC or Accenture have yet been able to deploy clinical functionality on top of the iSoft PAS systems. EHI understands that the critical ‘clinicals’, such as order communications, are subject to lebgthy delays and are still under development.

In the South of England EHI understands that Fujitsu remains confident of going live with its first Cerner Millennium implementation at Nuffield Orthopaedic Hospital, Oxford, by the end of December, though this will be a ‘spineless’ implementation.

Editorial note –

The above is an updated and corrected version of the news item which when originally published had not reflected the PAS implementations delivered by CSC and Accenture.