McKesson commits to bring Paragon to NHS

US healthcare IT company, McKesson, has committed to bring its Paragon hospital information system to the NHS market.

The system, which is aimed at the mid-sized community hospital market in the US, will be anglicised for use in the NHS, where it will be offered to acute trusts as a replacement to ageing McKesson TotalCare and Star systems.

McKesson has employed a UK-based team to work alongside the US Paragon team in order to adapt he product for the NHS and will use a “multi-staged deployment strategy” to implement the system across NHS trusts.

E-Health Insider understands that a number of existing McKesson sites have committed to take the Paragon product, if it can be successfully anglicised over the next couple of years.

Last week, EHI exclusively revealed that McKesson had signed a new £36m four year deal with NHS Connecting for Health to continue to support its current PAS products TotalCare and Star at 26 NHS trusts across the country.

The systems had been due for replacement by NPfIT systems, but ongoing delays to the programme mean McKesson has an installed customer base second only to iSoft.

Adrian Wookey, vice president of service delivery at McKesson UK, said: “The core system is already clinically rich and many of the changes required for the NHS market will be achieved through straightforward application configuration.”

McKesson says the system, which is based on Microsoft technology, will allow clinicians to access a complete patient record from almost any location.

“Other key requirements will entail some development, such as the need to ensure National Programme/Spine compliance, consistency with UK clinical workflows, national requirements and standards and the use of local terminology and clinical coding,” said Wookey.

“It goes without saying that we will meet all these fundamental requirements in the same way we have already done with our existing clinical systems that continue to support trusts today and for the next four years.”

McKesson failed to be selected as a systems vendor for the National Programme for IT in the NHS during its 2003 procurements, when it was the number two supplier to the hospital sector. The company continues to have the second largest market share of PAS contracts in the acute second, behind iSoft.

As first reported by E-Health Insider in March 2009, the company had been considering bringing the product in the UK NHS market for over a year.

Charmaine McDonald, then-UK managing director of McKesson told EHI it would only launch the product “if we had sufficient interest from our existing customer base.”

EHI understands that sufficient commitment has been secured for the US company to make the investment in a UK adapted Paragon

According to McKesson, Paragon will provide a suite of multidisciplinary clinical, patient and administrative functions which are integrated as a single solution but can be deployed on a modular basis.

Wookey added: “We are confident that compared to other systems coming to the market, McKesson’s will be the most cost effective solution available and will deliver the functionality that is required by our customers today.”