CfH aims to install at 22 acute trusts by October

NHS Connecting for Health and its prime contractors have told a member of the Commons Public Accounts Committee that they will deliver at least 22 new patient administration system (PAS) replacements to NHS acute trusts by the end of October this year.  The figure does not include any London trusts.

To date the programme has delivered PAS systems to a total of 12 acute trusts, over the course of the past two and a half years. To now deliver 22 more in the next four months would be a remarkable achievement.

The startling predictions on deployments are made in letters from the heads of the four Local Service Providers – Accenture, CSC, Fujitsu and BT – to Gordon Hextall, chief operating officer of Connecting for Health, written at the end of June. The letters were provided as submissions for last week’s Commons PAC hearing. 

The correspondence was triggered by a question from Richard Bacon, conservative MP and member of the PAC, who asked CfH how many PAS systems would be installed in acute trusts by the end of October. In a covering letter Richard Granger, head of NHS CfH says the information provided by the LSPs “is as accurate and up to date as possible”.

BT

BT, the LSP for London, was the only LSP to not directly answer the question. Instead it stated that it would deliver 3 acute PAS systems by year end, but didn’t name any specific sites. To date BT has delivered IDX’s Carecast system to just one hospital, Queen Mary’s Sidcup NHS Trust.

In addition to acute PAS systems BT said it would install 7 mental health and community systems “each with full PAS” – this is understood to be the RiO community product rather than GE’s Carecast.

Fujitsu

Fujitsu, which plans to deliver 4 implementations of Cerner Millennium by the end of August, says that in addition to spine-connected PAS functionality the initial (Release 0) version of Cerner’s Millennium software provided will contain maternity, A&E, theatre scheduling and order communications and results reporting.

Fujitsu added: "Some trusts will continue to use existing legacy systems for certain clinical functions until the R1 or R2 software releases for their own convenience".

To date Fujitsu has implemented Millennium at just one trust, the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, which first went live in December 2005 and encountered significant teething problems.   

Fujitsu said it would deliver the following by October:

CSC

CSC, which has implemented iSoft’s existing iPM PAS system at 9 acute trusts and across 50 primary care trusts and 4 mental health trusts, said it would deliver the following by October:

Accenture

Accenture, the LSP for both the Eastern and North-east clusters, has so far only implemented one acute PAS: iSoft’s iPM system at Scarborough Hospital NHS Trust. It said it would deliver the following by October:

[*Ipswich are the first site for the so called Plymouth solution.]

Accenture said it would also deliver five “Standalone Core Deployments and Additional Service Requests” by the end of October, including theatre systems at Kettering (30 June) and North Lincolnshire and Goole (September) and A&E at North Tees and Hatlepool (September).

Accenture also said that it would deliver 4 instances of its Radiology Information System (RIS) by the end of October and 9 PACS implementations. Fujitsu said it would install a further 9 PACS and 11 RIS over the same period. BT meanwhile said it would deliver 7 PACS and 4 RIS. CSC gave no details of its plans on PACS.

EHI has seperately learned that Accenture has told some NHS trusts in its two clusters that no more implementation projects will be begun until it has completed contract renegotiations with NHS Connecting for Health.  The only projects that  will proceed at this stage are those that already have a signed off project initiation document.