Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS Trust has become the third NHS trust in the South of England to begin to use clinical software from Cerner under the £12.4bn National Programme for IT.
The Amersham and Wycombe Hospitals, Chalfont & Gerrards Cross Hospital and Marlow Cottage Hospital all went live at eight yesterday morning, after a day of further testing to ensure the Millennium system was ready for implementation.
Jan Wood, head of the IM&T modernisation programme across Buckinghamshire, told E-Health Insider: “I can confirm that we did go live across two PCTs and one acute trust in Buckinghamshire this morning and it’s been a case of so far, so good.”
The trust is the first in the Southern cluster to use the maternity software component of the system and Wood said that has been a success.
“Our maternity ward is pleased with the new software and so far that’s going well as well. We have been training our staff on the new system since the beginning of summer and the transition has been smooth today,”
A spokesperson for Fujitsu said: “The system is working smoothly across all the areas that were formerly using the old IRC PAS and the response from users who are getting used to the new system has been positive.”
CfH added in a statement: “The South Bucks deployment family are utilising the PAS, Maternity and Scheduling functionality of R0. Initial indications are that it is working smoothly (across all the areas that were formerly using the old PAS).”
The implementation was delayed for one month, EHI understands. However, the trust said this worked in its favour, as the implementation team were able to review and learn from the teething problems at Weston and the difficulties suffered by Nuffield.
Wood confirmed to EHI that Buckinghamshire will be the first trust to join a regional domain and Milton Keynes should be joining the area’s domain soon.
“We have allowed more time for end to end testing of the Cerner software and to integrate the lessons learnt from the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre late last year and Weston’s implementation at the end of July and we now hope to see Milton Keynes joining us soon.”
A spokesperson for Milton Keynes told EHI: “In order to allow sufficient time for the BHT implementation to ‘bed in’ and allow for redeployment of staff, the overall CFH project plan requires a minimum of two weeks between each go-live date. To allow for this gap, it is intended the MK system will now go live early to mid-October.”
Wood said that despite initial teething problems the transition has been a success: “I think it’s wonderful. It’s been a while coming, but everyone involved with the project has greeted it with excitement, especially at the prospect of information being recorded faster and administration being made easier for all our staff.”
Fujitsu added: “We are thrilled with the implementation of the system, especially as we have had our first baby born and registered using the Cerner system. We hope to be able to implement more systems across the South on the back of this success. ”
Related stories