Bristol gains it on RiO

NHS South Gloucestershire, NHS North Somerset and NHS Bristol will all have gone live with RiO within the next six weeks.

Avon IM&T Consortium, the shared service that is responsible for the project, says NHS South Gloucestershire successfully went live with the community and mental health electronic patient record system last Monday.

The PCT will be followed by North Somerset in two weeks' time and then NHS Bristol a month after that.

The string of go-lives will enable between 3,500 and 4,000 members of staff to use the latest version of the community and mental health electronic patient record system.

This enables staff to access electronic case records, allocate, share and reassign caseloads, and record treatments. It also provides single sign-on, access to patient demographic details and Choose and Book.

Anthony Palmer, projects portfolio manager for Avon IM&T Consortium, told E-Health Insider: “The implementation project started about nine months ago and has since involved the business change analysis and planning, getting the infrastructure up to scratch and making sure the data migration is right.”

Last April, BT signed an agreement with NHS Connecting for Health to provide the RiO system to an additional 25 trusts in the South of England. Palmer said: “When the contract with BT was reset last year, we saw it as an opportunity to obtain central funding.

"Before that we carried out a due diligence test where we looked at both Cerner Millennium and RiO. RiO scored particularly highly for us, because it provided a more bespoke system for community services.”

In addition to the three PCTs that are going live in Avon, NHS Portsmouth will also go-live with the system within the next six weeks.

Link: BT Health homepage