London RiO upgrades remain on hold

Upgrades to the RiO community and mental health system remain on hold in London, despite a two week deadline to fix problems, which passed a fortnight ago.

As first reported by E-Health Insider on 14 May, BT provided upgrades to version 5.1 of RiO were suspended at all NHS trusts in London after a series of performance problems were reported.

Twelve of the 31 trusts in the capital using RiO had switched to version 5.1 of the software, the first to use a range of NHS Spine services including security and the personal demographic service. Further implementations were put on hold for two weeks.

The upgrade introduces smartcard authentication for the first time, requiring staff to use the NHS smartcard to access the system. But sites that received the upgrade reported performance problems, including periods of very slow response times and patient data not being reliably saved by the system.

A spokesperson for the London Programme for IT told, E-Health Insider: “We haven’t resumed our upgrade programme as yet . This is to ensure that the root cause of the issue is fully understood before we migrate a large number of users to the new version of RiO.”

The spokesperson added: “We're working closely with trusts, BT and its suppliers to resolve the issue and once there has been a period of consistent improvement the deployment schedule will recommence as soon as we can.”

In addition to 31 NHS community and mental health trusts in London, BT now has a contract to provide the RiO system to 25 trusts in the South of England.

A source close to CSE Servelec told EHI that the problems, though frustrating, were being worked through and would be fixed.

The twelve NHS trusts to have so far received the RiO 5.1 upgrade are: Barking and Dagenham PCT; Barnet PCT; Bexley PCT; Camden PCT; City and Hackney Teaching PCT; Hammersmith and Fulham PCT; Islington PCT; Kingston PCT: Southwark PCT; Waltham Forrest PCT; Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust; West London Mental Health NHS Trust.