Royal Bath reaches Millennium in July

Royal United Hospital Bath NHS Trust has committed to go-live with Cerner Millennium by July, 2011.

The trust is one of three ‘greenfield’ sites in the South of England that are due to receive the electronic patient record system as part of a £542m contract awarded to BT in April 2010.

The other two trusts are North Bristol and Oxford Radcliffe, both of which say they will go-live before the end of the calendar year. All three implementations will use a new Cerner delivery model.

Bath’s planned go-live date falls three years after the July 2008 go-live that it had to abandon when then-local service provider Fujitsu left the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

In June 2008, EHI reported that Bath’s decision to stop the go-live had been taken just days before the trust was to begin transferring data from its old TDS patient administration system.

Hundreds of staff had already been trained on the new system, which was also to be used by two neighbouring primary care trusts.

RUH board papers suggest the trust is now in urgent need of new IT. It says key risks in its Cerner deployment include the possible failure of its ageing TDS PAS or “[the] failure of [the] existing theatres system, ORSOS”.

The papers add: “TDS relies on obsolete technology, is expensive to run and challenging to maintain" while ORSOS has had "recent stability issues."

However, they also identify the use of a the new Cerner implementation methodology as a potential risk.

“The relationship between BT and Cerner has now been tested in recent go lives at Kingston [Hospital NHS Trust] and St George’s [Healthcare NHS Trust in London].

"However, the deployment model offered to the greenfield trusts is based on Cerner methodology which has not been fully utilised in existing UK deployments.”

A further project risk is identified as lack of end user engagement. “The required changes in working practice may not be achieved due to lack of engagement with end users based on previous experience of Cerner Millennium deployments within the trust.”

At one point in the latest round of planned deployments, North Bristol NHS Trust was also working to a July go-live date. This has now been delayed.

EHI has been told that North Bristol will now aim to go live in November with Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust set to follow in December.

Elsewhere in the South of England, Royal Berkshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is planning to go live with Cerner this summer, in a deal with UPMC and Cerner awarded outside the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

The trust awarded the contract in June 2009, after facing repeated delays to its NPfIT project that were also partly related to Fujitsu’s departure.