Bath ends planned Fujitsu deployment

Bath’s Royal United Hospital NHS Trust has terminated the planned implementation of a Cerner Millennium care record system that was to have been supplied by Fujitsu.

On 26 June, E-health Insider reported that the trust had delayed a planned 12 July implementation, because of the uncertainty created by Fujitsu’s departure as the National Programme for IT’s local service provider in the south. The trust has now ended the Fujitsu-led implementation project entirely.

The decision means yet more delays for staff and patients at the trust, which had first been due to get the Millennium CRS in June 2006. Bath and North East Somerset Primary Care Trust and Wiltshire PCT were also to get the system as part of the implementation.

The trust now plans to take the Cerner system at an unspecified later date, though it is not clear whether this would be from a replacement LSP or, potentially, directly from Cerner.

A spokesperson for the Southern Programme for IT told E-Health Insider: “NHS Connecting for Health can confirm that the planned deployment of Cerner Millennium by Fujitsu Services is no longer taking place. Alternative plans will be put in place during the next few months.”

The spokesperson added: “I can confirm that NHS CFH and Fujitsu Services will continue to provide support to live sites while the options for alternative arrangements are assessed between the Department, the strategic health authorities and NHS CFH.”

As part of the exit transition arrangements Fujitsu, which last week began redundancy procedures in its health team, had been meant to complete the implementation at Bath.

Gordon Hextall, the head of NHS CFH, recently told EHI the completion of Fujitsu’s exit from the programme should occur by November.

Sources close to the project say that exit plans are ferociously complicated, particularly any transfer of the systems currently deployed out of the Fujitsu data centre, in which systems and data sit.