Kingston hits go-live date with Cerner

Kingston Hospital NHS Trust has confirmed that it has gone live with its Cerner Millennium Care Records Service (CRS) programme.

E-Health Insider can exclusively reveal that the trust switched from its iSoft CliniCom Patient Administration System (PAS) to the new Cerner system at the weekend with “different areas coming up on stream” over Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The final functionality went live yesterday morning in the outpatients department.

In a statement provided by the trust to EHI, Katie Grimes Kingston’s chief executive, said: “The escalation process, with the different layers of support, seems to be working.

“Our CRS Command Centre is a hive of activity with the teams there solving minor technical glitches with the transfer of data between our old PAS and CRS. Many of the issues are simply the nerves of the first few hours of using the system, which is exactly what we predicted and planned for.”

Kingston is the first hospital to go-live with the US system in 18 months after serious complications occurred after its implementation at the Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust.

Grimes said: “It’s early days but so far I am just so pleased and impressed. Staff have remained calm and professional and are very positive about CRS, with some already extolling the benefits of the new system.”

The trust added that patients are responding well and are being informed about what is going on.

“We’ve taken time to ensure that they know we are doing something new, and explaining that it might take us a little longer to get to grips with the new system.

“There have been some queues, but no more so than on a really busy day in the hospital. We’ve had staff out talking to patients, handing out letters and flyers with information on them – and a free cup of tea!” Grimes said.

The hospital went live on the final day of November, the very latest that director general of informatics, Christine Connelly, said that Local Service Providers (LSP) BT and CSC were given to make “significant process” with their strategic systems under the National Programme for IT.

In April, she said that she wanted LSP CSC to roll out the electronic patient record from iSoft in any care-setting and BT to implement Cerner Millennium in an acute care setting by the end of November 2009.

At the beginning of November, Connecting for Health published the criteria, which the success of the deployments will be based on, and the outcome of the assessment is expected towards the end of December.

Grimes added: “We won’t know if it’s been a success for a few months but we have a set of criteria by which we will judge progress over the next few weeks. It’s been a night and day project for quite some time and we are all delighted CRS is finally here.”

Link: Cerner