Imperial completes trust-wide IMS PAS

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust has completed the roll out of its IMS Maxims patient administration system across all of its hospital sites.

The trust is meant to take Cerner Millennium under BT’s local service provider contract with the National Programme for IT in the NHS next year.

However, it extended its original contract for an IMS PAS that was already in use at Charing Cross, Hammersmith, Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospitals to cover St Mary’s and the Western Eye Hospital.

The IMS PAS has replaced an ageing iSoft system and the implementation has involved installing new hardware and migrating existing data onto the new system.

New interfaces have also been built to support existing departmental systems and so data can be integrated from other sites and clinical areas.

Alistair Shearin, chief information officer at Imperial, said: “The decision to roll out the IMS Maxims PAS at St Mary’s and the Western Eye Hospitals was based on the fact that the system – referred to locally as ICHIS (integrated computerised hospital information system) – has been used successfully at Hammersmith, Charing Cross and Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea hospitals for many years.

“For such a large trust it is critical that it has one common system, running across the disparate hospital sites, to allow the transfer of information into a single patient administration record.”

The trust says functionality around patient master indexing was one of the key reasons for extending the deployment of the IMS PAS across the remaining sites.

Shearin added: “By creating a sophisticated, unified index of patients, the system has enabled the sharing of information and processing of referrals, admissions, discharges and settlements easily and seamlessly across the trust, improving the efficiency and management of patient care.”

The trust still maintains that it will be the next to deploy Cerner Millennium. If it does, it will be the first since St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust went live with the system last April.

Imperial was originally due to go-live with Cerner in August 2008. EHI understands that the trust will go live with order communications next spring and then implement the Cerner PAS.

The trust argues that by rolling out a system that is compatible with current NPfIT systems, and is Choose and Book compliant, data migration will be much smoother when it moves to the Millennium system.

“The PAS will also provide a stable platform to phase the transition towards the trust’s longer term strategic objective under NPfIT to implement the Cerner Millennium solution,” added Shearin.

Shane Tickell, chief executive of IMS Maxims said: “As a well proven solution, this is a clear demonstration of the capability of the IMS MAXIMS PAS to support one of the largest NHS trusts in the UK.

"It also highlights the scalability of the solution and its ability to streamline patient data and deliver accurate information when and where required.”

Link: IMS Maxims