Royal Berks suspends Cerner contracts

Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust has suspended two contracts worth £6.5m that it holds with Cerner for support of its Millennium electronic patient record system.

The trust’s November board papers include a ‘Monitor update: EPR progress report’, which says Royal Berkshire suspended its application and operational management services contracts with Cerner from November.

The trust awarded the contracts in May 2012. The AMS, worth £6m, was expected to run for 10 years, while the OMS, worth £500,000, was anticipated to run for a year.

The contracts were awarded without a procurement process because they could only be supplied by Cerner and due to “extreme urgency brought about by events unforeseeable,” the award notice said at the time.

The AMS would provide the essential second line service desk and support needed to support the implementation and operation of Millennium and the OMS would support the trust’s go-live date and include management and remote monitoring of the system.

The contract awards came as a surprise at the time because the trust had signed a hosting contract with CSC covering Cerner Millennium in early 2010. Royal Berkshire also holds a separate, seven-year outsourcing deal with CSC, including helpdesk support, worth up to £50m.

The trust deployed Millennium in June last year, but experienced considerable problems with the system, leading to much higher operating costs than budgeted.

An EPR update presented to the Council of Governors in October says that if the trust continued with spending levels seen between April 2013 to September 2013, the operating costs for this financial year would be £5.3m.

However, a new EPR structure means the operating costs for this financial year are estimated to be £4.5m. Royal Berkshire plans to reduce costs to £3.4m by April 2015.

“The trust has been reviewing its operating costs in partnership with Cerner to reduce this to a manageable and appropriate level which is affordable in the long term. One of the areas of review has been the termination of service contracts,” the update says.

“Our approach in developing a new EPR structure allows us to build an in-house team to manage the current system and work towards implementing a digital EPR.”

The trust is recruiting from current EPR contractors and external applicants with the first round of interviews held on 2 December.

The document says that while use of the system continues to be challenging, it is now considered to be stable.

“The issues encountered with the Cerner Millennium system have prepared the trust to better understand and deal with the challenges in delivering a digital EPR by 2018.”

What that EPR will look like is yet to be determined. At a September meeting, the Council of Governors pressed the chairman regarding the trust’s plans.

“The chairman confirmed that a portal/modular route was a possible option which may or may not involve the Cerner product. However, contractual discussions must first be concluded and options carefully balanced and judged,” the minutes say.

Trust board papers also reveal that Royal Berkshire has decided to pause the build of the EPR integrated Cerner Radnet radiology information system and withdraw inhouse support for the system.