Taunton go-live with Cerner Millennium

Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust has become the eighth site in the South of England to go-live with the Cerner Millennium patient administration system under the National Programme for IT.

The trust went live with Millennium Release 0, delivered by local service provider Fujitsu, on the weekend of 15-16 December.

In a statement the trust said the software has now “been successfully introduced at Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton.”

Musgrove Park is the largest general hospital in Somerset, serving a population of over 340,000. The hospital has over 700 beds and employs around 4000 staff.

The trust is the first site to go live with a version of Millennium which is compatible with direct booking to the national Choose and Book electronic appointments systems.

In a statement to E-Health Insider the trust said: “Cerner Millennium updates the old system and forms a secure base for future developments. It makes patient information even safer than before and will allow for much quicker and efficient use of information.”

Hospital consultant, Dr Tim Jobson, said: “This paves the way for the implementation of sophisticated clinical systems, which will bring about significant improvements in patient care. We have transferred over 660,000 sets of patient records, over 60,000 future appointments and all our waiting list information.

Dr Jobson added: “It is bound to take a while to get used to any change as big as this, and I am very grateful to our patients for bearing with us as the new system kicks in. However, early signs are that there are no major concerns and the hospital is continuing as usual”.

Initially due to go the weekend of 7-8 October 2006, Taunton delayed going live with the system for 14 months. In October 2006 the trust told E-Health Insider it had decided to postpone switching to the new software as “some technical situations that have to be sorted.”  

The system was further delayed at the end of June 2007. Around the same time, David Wrede, a senior consultant at the trust, gave vent to his frustrations with the version of the Millennium system on offer from Fujitsu the local service provider in the South at the BMA’s Annual Representative Meeting. He claimed that the trust had had more than a dozen go-live dates postponed.

Taunton’s director of finance and performance, Peter Lewis, said the new system had been worth the wait.

“This is the largest implementation of an IT project in the history of the hospital. We have had a team of people working on this for over two years, testing and retesting the system to make sure that it does what we need it to. Given the scale and impact of the project we have experienced far fewer teething troubles than were expected.

“Our staff have done a simply fantastic job in putting a comprehensive and complex new system into place and working hard to overcome the inevitable challenges that transferring from one system to another will bring.”

Peter Hutchinson, Fujitsu’s head of public sector, told EHI: “It’s very early days but the system is now in and running.”

Fujitsu and BT, the local service provider in London, say they will start deploying the next version of the Millennium software (Release 1) early this year. Trusts that have already taken the initial R0 version of Millennium will be offered upgrades.

Joe Fernandez