South trust on journey to Millennium EPR

Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust is slowly adding clinical functionality to Cerner Millennium as part of a "five year journey" towards a fully operational electronic patient record system.

The trust deployed Millennium in September 2006 as part of the National Programme for IT in the NHS, when Fujitsu was still the local service provider for the region. It went live with the LC1e upgrade from BT in September last year.

Katie Coward, who has been working on the Buckinghamshire trust’s project for six years, said it is now using a maternity module of Millennium and some clinical functionality.

A&E is introducing FirstNet and Millennium is being rolled out across all theatre suites between now and April, with two of seven live so far.

“We’re just picking up on clinical workstreams," Cowad told eHealth Insider as part of an investigation into the benefits that Southern trusts have seen from the introduction of Cerner Millennium.

"That’s just kicking off now, and we’re beginning to plan at what point of the implementation we should add discharge summaries.

In the five years before the upgrade, the trust essentially had “a super duper [patient administration system],” said Coward.

However, she said it now has the foundation on which to build an EPR, and a five year plan for achieving that.

“We didn’t want to take a big bang approach, we wanted to do it at our own pace. The plan is to develop both Millennium and RiO [the community and mental health system from CSE Healthcare] to develop an EPR,” she said.

“It’s taken us slightly longer than expected to get to this point because of the complexity that was introduced to the [national] programme through the termination of the Fujitsu [deal], and the new contract re-negotiations [with BT] that added in time.”

Coward said the trust had been able to drop some of its legacy systems, and this has delivered cost savings.

“We have realised some benefits, particularly over the whole programme. We had two legacy PAS systems, now we have one PAS integrated with the national spine and [Personal Demographics Service] connected.”

Another key benefit has been increased security through the use of smartcards and data quality improvements due to connection with the spine.

Following problems at North Bristol and Oxford University Hospitals, the latest trusts to go-live with Millennium, EHI contacted all the Southern trusts that have been live with the system since 2006 and 2007.

It has established that the Southern CRS Executive, an informal body of IT managers from the live sites, has put together a list of potential benefits.

The trusts have submitted monitoring reports to the Department of Health. The DH, Southern Programme for IT and individual trusts have declined to release these reports. 

However, the DH has said that they will be published as part of an overdue report to the Commons’ public accounts committee, on the benefits of NPfIT as a whole.

Coward said the Executive has been invaluable in allowing Southern trusts to learn from each others’ experience.

She said Buckinghamshire Healthcare had particular issues with reporting when Millennium was first deployed, but these were resolved prior to its second deployment at Stoke Mandeville Hospital 18 months later, which went “like clockwork."

“I think, on the whole, staff have adopted and are using the system in the way that they should be,” she added.

“There are, of course, frustrations at times, as there should be because this is a massive wholescale change.”

Coward also sits on the trust’s patient experience group and says patients are “very encouraged” by IT developments.

As an example of how these have improved patient experience, she said the trust has been able to reformat letters for the visually impaired.

“They can see where the patient experience will be improved over the coming months and years,” she said.

There is more information about the investigation in this week’s Insight section and EHI will be publishing further stories about Millennium in the South in coming days.

Anybody with more information can contact reporter Rebecca Todd can be contacted in confidence.