Winchester and Eastleigh Healthcare NHS Trust has became the first in the South of England to upgrade its Cerner Millennium electronic patient record system to the London version.
The Cerner upgrade is said to improve trusts’ ability to use existing clinical and reporting features, enable greater local configuration and support integration with local systems.
The upgrade is also understood to open the way for trusts to have their own Cerner domain, so they no longer need to share a single health community domain.
Winchester is due to be followed by the six other Cerner Millennium trusts in the South managed by BT under the National Programme for IT in the NHS.
In a statement to E-Health Insider, BT said: “BT has worked closely with the trust, the Southern Programme for IT and Cerner over the past year and is pleased at the progress being made.
“BT is now working with the six other Cerner Millennium trusts in the region to upgrade their systems in the coming months.”
To implement LC1, each of the seven live trusts in the south must first implement the code upgrade (2010.01). Winchester upgraded to Cerner LC1 on 11 December.
The trusts had the Cerner system installed by Fujitsu, before it had its LSP contract terminated in April 2008.
BT was awarded a £546m deal in April 2009 to support the then-eight, now seven, live sties and to deliver four, now three, new implementations of the software.
The deal also covered implementation of 25 instances of the RiO community system.
No new Cerner site has gone live in the South of England in almost three years, the last being Taunton and Somerset.
The next Southern trust expected to go live is Royal United Hospital Bath NHS Trust, which is currently planning to turn on the system in June 2011.
BT said it was for trusts to comment on when they planned to go live. “However, we are looking to begin deployments of Cerner Millennium to all the greenfield trusts in the South next year”.