Oxford to try again with Millennium

Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust is to have another go at launching its Cerner Millennium electronic patient record system this weekend.

The trust achieved a technical go-live earlier this month, when it upgraded Millennium at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre.

The Nuffield received the system in 2005, when it was a ‘test-bed’ for Millennium in the South of England, while Fujitsu was still the local service provider.

However, plans for staff at the trust’s other hospitals to start using the system last weekend were postponed at the last minute.

The trust said the delay was due to some preparatory configuration work taking longer than expected. It is now hoping to go live with this phase of the project this weekend.

In a statement, it said: “The Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust is going live with phase 1 of the electronic patient record implementation over the weekend of Saturday 3 December.

“The three areas of the system which will be turned on are the patient administration system, emergency department and maternity.”

The trust is one of three ‘greenfield’ sites in the South of England that are due to receive Millennium from BT, which won a deal for the work last April.

The first of the greenfield sites, Royal United Hospital Bath NHS Trust, went live over the summer.

The third, North Bristol NHS Trust, told eHealth Insider this week that it expects to go live “in the next few weeks” when it will “begin the transition from two old systems, into a single new one.”

A trust spokesperson said this week that the trust has “planned in the initial go live for the emergency department to be virtually paperless and for a number of nursing assessments to be done electronically throughout the trust."

They added: "We are currently on schedule for a smooth transition.”

The Oxford trust has stressed that its go-live dates are by no means ‘set in stone’, and it is important to go live when the system is ready.

Following on from the first phase of the implementation, the trust will look at adding additional clinical functionality to enable “new ways of working for both the trust and the wider healthcare community in Oxfordshire.”