Newham plans next steps with Cerner

Newham University Hospital NHS Trust says it is planning to use its Cerner Millennium system to deliver integrated patient care pathways.

Five years after Newham and its neighbour, Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, became the first two NHS trusts to implement Millennium, Newham says it is set to add new functionality to improve patient care and efficiency.

The trust is working with local service provider BT and the National Programme for IT in the NHS to plan for full hospital e-prescribing and medicines management, although no date for go-live has been set. More concretely, it will implement directly bookable Choose and Book in February.

Newham says that more effective use of the EPR system will help it achieve £500,000 savings on record storage.

To help it achieve these new goals, the trust has said it will partner with Cerner through the Cerner Engagement Model and the US firm’s ‘Experience Centre’.

Newham implemented Cerner Millennium in 2005, ahead of the national programme, but since 2007 has been supported by BT.

It says that 2,000 of its 2,300 staff now have access to the electronic patient record. The system is in use across the whole trust and used in some community-based clinics.

Michaela Morris, the chief operating officer at Newham, told E-Health Insider: “Our experience has been very good. The EPR developed in partnership with Homerton over the past five years has supported administrative processes and patient care.”

She said that after “initial implementation challenges” the system had become “stable in the first year”.

She also said that providing access outside the walls of the hospital was a vital part of the trust’s future plans. “We want to use the system to better support patient pathways,” she explained.

Next steps include upgrading Millennium to provide new views of patient information using Cerner’s Power Insight Explorer to help with the analysis of clinical data.

“We are also working with NPfIT and Cerner to implement full electronic prescribing and medicines administration,” said Morris. “We are very keen to begin soon.”

The trust says it plans to reduce the use of paper patient notes, which costs more than £500,000 a year, by identifying individual clinicians who are underutilising the EPR and working with them one-on-one to increase their usage.

Millennium is already used for online patient result viewing. Clinicians can instantly access patient information from any computer in the hospital and, through secure remote connections, outside the hospital, either in clinics or home offices.

Other benefits of the Millennium system include online documentation of A&E triage forms including an assessment of patient acuity, and creating a more efficient A&E triage process.

Millennium has also enabled results viewing via flow sheet providing real-time display of documented laboratory, radiology and patient care results.

The trust says the system has helped it meet the national four hour A&E wait times, and the 18-week referral to treatment target.

“The system also has the functionality that will allow us to provide discharge summaries,” said Morris. The next milestone will be to go live with “direct booking in early February.”

Morris said: “The continuous support we’ve received through direct engagement has enabled us to move beyond mere adoption of the system into achievement of benefits that are helping us improve patient care.”

Cerner says its ‘Experience Centre’ brings the collective experience and recommendations of Cerner Millennium users directly to trusts to help them develop further plans.

“The Cerner Experience Centre enables trusts to find additional ways to maximise their Cerner Millennium solutions as the healthcare environment is constantly changing around them,” said Jake Sorg, UK Solutions Centre vice president.