Birmingham Children’s Hospital NHS Trust has become the latest trust to experience problems after Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) installed new remotely-hosted patient administration system (PAS) software supplied by iSoft.
Following a software upgrade to its new PAS system, outpatient appointment data for 800 children became unviewable to staff using the day clinic module of the system. To overcome the problem the trust had to temporarily switch off parts of the system affected by the ‘upgrade’ and revert to paper systems. Sources say the problem resulted in "chaos" for two weeks.
This most recent incident at Birmingham Children’s Hospital follows problems with iPM installations earlier this year, resulting in incomplete views of patient records and misrecording of patient data.
The problems occurred with instances of the iSoft iPM system installed by CSC at trusts across the North-west and West Midlands (NWWM). including University Hospital Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust. As a result CSC had to run regular software fixes from its data centre to identify and correct problems created in patient records and data files.
EHI has learned that CSC bosses have become extremely concerned about “product performance problems”, and that there is a perception among some trusts in NWWM that the iPM product needs more work before further installations occur. Any delays would be likely to impact on CSC revenues.
The latest problems at Birmingham arose after installation of an upgrade to the Children’s Hospital’s new iSoft iPM PAS system on 23 June. Birmingham Children’s Hospital identified a fault “which meant that around 800 future outpatient appointments could not be seen in a limited number of clinic areas,” the trust told E-Health Insider.
After the software update, appointment data for 800 children became unviewable in the systems ‘day clinic’ or ‘detailed view’ screens but could still be viewed in ‘patient view’ and ‘appointment view.’
The trust said that the problem was quickly spotted after the upgrade was installed. After the problem was spotted it switched off the parts of the iPM system affected by the software upgrade, until a fix was installed two weeks later on 5 July.
A spokesperson from iSoft told EHI that a fix was developed as soon as the problem was identified and provided within 48 hours. They stressed that no data was lost, even though some appointment information unavailable to users in certain circumstances.
“At no point did patient details disappear from the system, software was not removed, but the affected parts of the system, were turned off while corrective work was done,” confirmed a trust spokesperson. They added that the problem had now been “satisfactorily resolved.”
The spokesperson added: “Prior to the permanent fix, temporary measures were put in place by the trust and CSC allowing patient records to be accessed, ensuring continuity of business and minimising the effect on patient care.”
The trust added that even with the problems with iPM it still had “sufficient patient details available for the operation of the clinics affected and the running of the clinics was not adversely affected by taking part of the system offline.”
The spokesperson concluded that the trust had worked in full collaboration with the West Midlands SHA, CSC and Connecting for Health.
In March EHI reported the existence of a problem in the iPM software provided by NHS Connecting for Health to trusts in the three northern regions of England which, in certain circumstances, resulted in patient records becoming unavailable or misrecorded.
Staff exiting a record in iPM without using the ‘close’ function resulted in data being saved onto the database in an ‘interim’ status – making details of changes or appointments booked unavailable to subsequent users. As a result patients were showing up for booked clinic appointments only to find the hospital had no record of their appointment.
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