Whittington goes live with Medway

Whittington Health has gone live with the maternity module of Medway as part of plans to be one of the first paperless trusts by 2015.

The trust deployed Medway maternity from System C, a McKesson company, last week as a first of three phases to implement the system.

Glenn Winteringham, the trust’s IT director, said: “The maternity module go-live has been very positive and gives us a lot of confidence for the scheduled go-lives later this year of the patient administration system, emergency department and a GP portal, with an integrated community module to go-live in late 2014.”

He added that Whittington hoped to be one of the first paperless trusts by 2015 and planned to roll-out a full electronic patient record system over the next two years.

The trust runs a legacy Totalcare PAS from McKesson, but the support contract for the system runs out in March next year. The new maternity module will integrate with Totalcare until the go-live of the Medway PAS.

Jenny Cleary, the trust’s head of midwifery and the lead for women’s and children’s services, said that the trust was trialling the maternity system on iPads. She hoped it would improve communication and access to information at the trust.

“This will allow us to demonstrate our high standards of care for women and their babies and, where necessary, highlight where improvements can be made to the clinical service,” she said.

“The system can interface to child health, radiology, results reporting and also help to reduce the amount of duplication of effort and the amount of paper used. That time saved can be time spent with the women in our care.”

McKesson announced last week that it was planning to sell McKesson UK, including subsidiaries System C and Liquidlogic.