Tees and NE Yorkshire postpones PAS project

Tees and North East Yorkshire NHS Trust has postponed implementation of an iSoft iPM Patient Administration System (PAS).

The mental health trust becomes the third NHS trust to tell E-Health Insider they have decided to shelve or postpone implementation of the iSoft system. All three trusts are located in the two Accenture clusters of the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT).

Tees and North East Yorkshire told E-Health Insider that a decision had been taken to "temporarily suspend the go live of the NCRS P1R1 product [NHS Care Records Service Phase One Release One]". Accenture the local service provider for the North East and Eastern clusters is offering iSoft’s iPM PAS as its NCRS P1R1 product.

An Accenture spokesperson said: "We have jointly decided with Tees and North East Yorkshire NHS Trust to temporarily postpone the go live of their iPM PAS solution whilst we continue to work with them to develop new releases of the system into 2006."

Explaining why it has shelved the implementation, the trust told EHI: "The trust has made the decision not to go live until the product can fully support the business processes and meet trust requirements." It added that a process has been agreed between the LSP and the trust "to continue to work on resolving the current issues with the product".

Earlier this week Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Trust, a large acute trust, told EHI that it had ended its efforts to implement the iPM PAS system from Lorenzo.

South West Yorkshire Mental Health Trust separately confirmed that it has gone outside the NHS IT programme to procure a new integrated clinical system, as an "interim solution, rather than take the iSoft iPM system.

Tees and North East Yorkshire NHS Trust said the decision to postpone implementation of the PAS system was taken "after full consultation with our mental health and learning disability services".

Despite suspending the implementation project, the trust stressed that it remained "fully committed to implementing all aspects of the National Programme for IT, including NCRS". It said work on the project, especially around service improvement, would not be wasted and "will be continued".

The trust, however, declined to comment on when it now anticipated implementing the system or how long it anticipated it would take before the iPM product would be able to fully support its business processes and requirements. "The project will continue once the trust is satisfied that the product fully meets the business requirements," said a spokesperson for the trust.

The Accenture spokesperson said that it had so far delivered iPM to five mental health trusts. "The spine connected iPM PAS solution is already being used by a variety of trusts and key learnings from these projects have enabled subsequent trusts to better judge the most advantageous time for them to adopt the new technology".

He added that Tees and North East Yorkshire NHS Trust had decided to postpone implementation "until there is a more beneficial balance between the benefits the solution brings and the degree of business process change required by the specific local situation".

The spokesperson said he was unaware of any other trusts in the North East and Eastern regions that had decided to defer taking the iSoft solution.