North East Wales switches on Myrddin PAS
- 9 June 2008
The North East Wales NHS Trust has successfully gone live with its new patient administration system (PAS), Myrddin.
The £1m Myrddin PAS system, which replaces an iSoft system, first went live on Monday 19 May.
A trust spokesperson told E-Health Insider: “Myrddin is performing as expected and there have been no other significant problems. Most importantly there has been no disruption to clinical services while the change over took place and patients have not been affected.”
The spokesperson added: “It will take staff time to get used to Myrddin and to gain the same levels of skill and experience that they had with the previous patient administration system. Many of the questions that users have raised over the last week have been about understanding the differences in the way the two systems work and the adjustments they need to make to their own procedures.”
The PAS is part-funded by the Welsh NHS “Informing Healthcare” programme. The trust says maintenance and running costs for Myrddin will be less than £250,000 per year which was the cost for the previous system, the trust says.
Initially the new PAS will only offer the same range of services that were available on the old system.
The North East Wales NHS Trust says over the coming months additional services will be brought into operation, extending the number of departments that are able to link into the system and “allowing it to play a greater role in coordinating the care of patients across the trust.”
The trust’s medical director, Mark Scriven, said: “This is one of the largest trusts in Wales to have moved to the Myrddin system. The planning for this has extended over nearly two years and has involved close co-operation between the system developers in the Hywel Dda NHS Trust and many colleagues here in the North East Wales Trust
“Although we did suffer some short term speed problems, staff coped magnificently by turning to our manual back-up systems and making sure that patients were not disadvantaged. To achieve such a major systems change with so little disruption is a huge achievement.”
He said with the technology now running smoothly, the biggest challenge was to help staff to find their feet with the new system.
In total the trust will be investing around £1m on the system. These costs cover the software, the IT infrastructure and hardware needed to run the system and the costs of moving the data from the old system to the new and will be spread out over five years.
Links
