Apira supports Hants transition to RiO

A project to migrate more than 350,000 children’s records from legacy systems to the RiO patient record system has been completed within Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust.

The data migration project was led by the trust, which was formed from a merger of Hampshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and Hampshire Community Health Care in 2009.

However, it procured technical migration services from Apira using the Additional Supply Capability and Capacity framework. This included the development of a comprehensive archive solution and was delivered in seven months.

Apira, supported by E.Novation UK, handled the transfer of data including approximately 3m immunisation records held in five disparate systems in NHS trusts across Hampshire.

Southern Health head of technology and innovation and data migration lead for the project, Sheree Palaczky, said the trust recognised that the migration element of the project would be complex and challenging to achieve in such a short timeframe.

“Although we had in-house experience of large migrations we needed to increase our technical capacity and RiO expertise with a supplier who was willing to respond flexibly to the emerging complexities of the project, and work seamlessly with trust resources to combine knowledge and experience,” Palaczky said.

“Apira were able to fulfil this role and the end result was a successful migration and archive solution for our Child Health Service.”

Apira’s archive system stores a copy of everyrecord from the legacy systems so there is no need to extend system licence fees.

The data is accessible as read-only through a user-friendly front end which has been rolled out across the Child Health Records Department. The archive meant no data was lost in the migration and there were no post go-live issues.

Apira is working on other RiO deployments at Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Trust, NHS Surrey, Surrey and Borders Partnership Trust and NHS Buckinghamshire.