Birmingham on slipway with Oceano

University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust is in the final stages of testing and preperation and it gets ready to go live with a new Oceano A&E module jointly developed in collaboration with CSE Healthcare.

The trust announced in June it had begun work on building the module with CSE and was planning to launch it in the autumn.

The trust has been carrying out testing of Oceano Emergency Department in the three weeks leading up to the go live, which has involved inputting real and mock patient data, and training staff.  It expects to go live with Oceano in about ten days.

The current Ascribe Symphony A&E system will be kept as a backup system after the Oceano system goes live and is signed off as working.

The trust’s executive medical director, Dave Rosser, told eHealth Insider Symphony would still be available if there are any problems with the new system.

He said the longer term intention for Oceano is to integrate it with the trust’s locally developed prescribing information and communications system (PICS), but that would not happen for another three months after the initial emergency department system went live.

The department will continue using the current pen and paper prescribing processes until PICs is successfully integrated with Oceano.

Rosser said he was unimpressed with Symphony and said the trust was eager to switch to Oceano as soon as possible.

“Symphony is clunky...we take a view that there is more than enough coming from Oceano to it now rather than wait [for the added integration].”

The trust had not considered taking a further offering from Ascribe because it viewed integration with its own PICS development was imperative.

“I don’t believe there was a willingness to do that from that provider [Ascribe],” Rosser said.

The trust entered into a working partnership with CSE Healthcare about 18 months ago when they teamed up to commercialise PICS, which was first built by University of Birmingham students 10 years ago.

A partnership was agreed on that UHB would not have to pay for Oceano because of its collaboration in developing the system. The trust also gets a share of profits from any sales of Oceano to other NHS trusts.

The first trust to officially buy the Oceano A&E module is the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust, which plans to go live at the start of November. 

CSE Healthcare’s strategic development director, Alistair Eaton, said the company was in discussions with a number of other trusts about Oceano contracts, but there was significant focus being placed on developing a full patient administration system (PAS).

Eaton said CSE intended to have a fully operational PAS by “summer next year”. The company is already in the process of selling the proposed system to trusts which have gone out to tender for new PAS systems.

University Hospitals Birmingham is the subject of the latest 'EHI focus on...' Insight series.