University Hospitals Birmingham goes live with OceanoPAS
- 8 August 2017
A global digital exemplar trust has gone live with a new patient administration system (PAS), co-developed with a supplier.
University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust launched OceanoPAS on 10 July, after migrating millions of patient records over the weekend.
The PAS has been developed with Servelec, in a four-year partnership with the trust.
Deborah McKee, head of clinical systems development/EPR at the trust, told Digital Health News a PAS implementation is “one of the biggest things you will ever do” as an organisation.
“We wanted to build something that made it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing, that was the mantra of our project”, McKee said.
The trust was previously on iPM PAS, which was implemented in 2006 as part of the National Programme for IT (NPfIT).
McKee said the newly implemented PAS, which was developed with trust staff, is user friendly and “guides you down the right path”.
The launch included a migration of more than 1 million patient records, 1.8 million outpatient appointments, 248,000 inpatient movements and 3,836 clinics across. Historic data is still available in a read only format.
Dean Grinham, deputy director of IT services at the trust, said that this migration was critical to the success of the deployment.
“We were reporting from day one, which was really key.”
The system is commercially available now via Servelec.
The OceanoPAS was developed out of the trust’s OceanoED module back in 2010. The PAS functions include supporting real time clinic reporting and accessible information standards.
Kevin Bolger, the trust’s director of strategic operations, described the roll-out as “a phenomenal achievement”.
“Although it is very early days, staff do like using the system and it is hoped that once it has fully bedded in, both the Trust and patients will see the benefits.”
The trust is well known for its in-house IT development, with its own prescribing information and communication system (PICS), which has been around since 1999.
Alan Stubbs, chief executive at Servelec said that the “journey behind Oceano showcases how through working collaboratively, and with the right support and focus, innovative ideas can be transformed to deliver real results to the NHS”.
Both McKee and Grinham wanted to thank the huge team effort on the implementation, and McKee said, “the team spirit on this project was phenomenal, to the point where we were making people go home”.
“What motivates all of us, of course, there’s a lot of horror stories unfortunately around PASs and that was not going to happen here”, said Grinham.
Birmingham has about 1,400 beds and has the largest critical care unit in Europe with 100 beds.
8 Comments
I know what a huge undertaking it is switching live systems, and especially the PAS at the heart of the hospital setting, so good that it went smoothly. But suprised at the ambition to implement a PAS rather than go beyond that to EPR. Haven’t we all been on a journey where the clinical workflow should be at the fore, and the features of a historic PAS – scheduling outpatients and wating lists, logging inpatient flows, feeding the centre and commissioning, should be falling out of the back of supporting frontline clinical and admin processes and optimised workflow ? Not to mention breaking the walls and thinking community wide scheduling and collaborative noting.
In my view we need far more working together like this between Trust teams and application vendors in order to develop optimal solutions. Too often software is developed based on a functional spec that ends up with clunky, hard to use and sometimes unsafe software. The cost of getting it right first time through this working together will always be less than the time wasted by users using sub optimal software followed by repeat cycles of CCNs and cost.
It will be nice to know how much it did cost to develop the system comparing to procuring one off the shelve e.g. Cerner, Epic.
And, how many software developers, programmers, IT staff Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust employed for the last four years.
Oceano is commercially available software and is not a bespoke in-house development – this was a collaborative partnership between Servelec and UHB to develop a PAS specifically tailored to NHS requirements. UHB provided the acute subject matter experts and were heavily engaged in the functional design. All the Development resource used for the product was provided by Servelec.
It’s worrying that there is still a trend for acute trusts to continue trying to build their own PAS systems – perhaps that says more about the PAS market than it does about the short-sighted approach of trusts.
Servelec has been collaborating on the development of Oceano over the past four years. Servelec’s team, including developers, worked with the testers, project managers and clinical experts at UHB to help shape the solution, so that it delivers maximum benefits in a NHS Setting. Oceano is a PAS solution that is “created with the NHS for the NHS” – a truly collaborative partnership between UHB and Servelec. The Oceano PAS solution is commercially available now via Servelec.
Well done Birmingham and Servelec for what appears to be a smooth go-live with a new to the market PAS system from a UK supplier.
Is the Servelec PAS live elsewhere in an acute setting?
John,
Looks like Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust are on their way to going live with Servelec Oceano PAS (link below). Indeed it is great news to have a UK supplier in the market who are working closely with NHS organisations working practices.
https://www.servelec-group.com/servelec-hsc/news/news/servelec-s-converged-care-story-continues-in-cornwall/
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