Millennium order comms live at Imperial

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with the first module of its deployment of Cerner Millennium.

A Cerner spokesperson told eHealth Insider the trust went live with order communications at the end of August.

The module has been integrated into the trust’s IMS Maxims patient administration system, which was rolled out across the trust at the end of last year, having previously been used at three of its five main sites.

At the time of the PAS roll-out, the trust said that it would go-live with order communications this spring, and then implement the Cerner Millennium patient administration system.

It argued that moving to a single PAS and then moving ahead with the Millennium deployment would make data migration easier.

Imperial opted to take the Millennium electronic patient record system under the National Programme for IT in the NHS, which the Cabinet Office has today confirmed will be dismantled.

It was initially due to go live with Millennium in August 2008. However, the move was put on hold after some of the early BT implementations of Millennium in the capital ran into significant problems.

Cerner said the order communications system has now been rolled out across radiology, pathology and laboratories – giving clinicians a single clinical ordering system to view and order test results.

“The system allows clinicians to place pathology and radiology orders electronically and receive the results in their inbox as well as seeing them in the patient records,” it said in a statement.

“Imperial’s clinicians therefore now have immediate access to results as soon as they become available, from any location with the hospital, as well as being able to view previous patient test results.”

The statement also said that the implementation of the system would result in faster turnaround times for results, increased standardisation of test ordering and the ability to configure order sets to the trust’s requirements.