Greater Manchester plans Paris in summer

Greater Manchester West Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust is planning to go live with Civica’s Paris electronic patient record by the end of the summer.

Trust board papers published in May say that Paris will replace Ascribe’s ICIS and, “support more flexible access to patient information for clinical users.”

Speaking to Digital Health News, Kerrie Darvill, deputy director of IM&T said the original plan was to go live with Paris over the Easter weekend, but this had to be delayed to ensure the process is safe.

One of the key issues is the amount of data that needs to be transferred. Greater Manchester West has been running as a ‘paper-lite’ trust since 2010 meaning and holds 6.5 million documents in ICIS.

To handle this amount of information, Civica has created a bespoke product called Paris Store, she explained.

“It’s that functionality that we have been working on with Civica to make sure we are clinically safe for implementation”.

The trust has now completed the migration of historical documents to the Paris Store.

Darvill added that the trust will not announce an official go-live date until everyone involved agrees, but it is likely to be before the end of summer.

She expects the deployment to be a ‘big bang’ process, because the trust is already operating in a paper-lite way, therefore a whole system change is necessary.

“I don’t think we have got much option really, which is why it matters that we get it right.”

Greater Manchester has already had two dress rehearsal go-lives and is due to perform a ‘mock’ go-live in the next few weeks.

The trust also plans to implement Hospedia’s bed management system at the same time as going live with Paris.

“This is a good opportunity to implement both. It’s a really big goal so I’m very keen we get it right before we go live,” said Darvill.

The trust purchased Paris through the North West clinical information systems framework group, which has supported several trusts in the region in their procurement processes for clinical IT systems.

Other trusts to have picked Paris through this framework include Pennine Care NHS Foundation.

The remaining trusts on the framework are 5 Boroughs Partnership NHS Trust; Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust; Cumbria Partnership Mental Health NHS Trust; Mersey Care NHS Trust; and Manchester Mental Health and Social Care.

Both Cumbria Partnership and 5 Boroughs Partnership have selected Servelec’s RiO through the framework.