Colchester delays PAS go-live further

Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust has further delayed the go-live of its clinical portal and patient administration system.

No new date has now been set for the development, more than a year after the original deployment date. 

In 2011, the trust set a go-live date for the Medway PAS of April 2013. It then realised that it needed to do further work before go-live, and put the date back to mid-October 2013.

However, the trust was then put into special measures by foundation trust regulator Monitor, following a poor Care Quality Commission inspection that uncovered allegations that cancer waiting lists had been manipulated.

The go-live was pushed back until spring and then August this year. However, a trust spokesperson told EHI that it has now been postponed yet again.

“We are still working with our supplier on the final plans, which will include agreeing a ‘go live’ date,” the spokesperson said.

The trust is still in special measures. As part of its turnaround, it implemented its Somerset Cancer Information System, which it bought in 2010 but had not implemented before the cancer waits problem came to light.

Investigations following the CQC / Monitor intervention found that six of the trust’s 17 cancer pathways were unsafe. But a July progress review from NHS England said five are now safe with no immediate concerns.

Colchester, which is taking the Medway PAS as part of a larger System C portal project, is running the legacy Totalcare system from McKesson, for which the support contract ended in April 2014.

However, McKesson has agreed to support the system until the trust goes live.

McKesson originally bought System C in 2011, however during the recent acquisition of McKesson UK by American company Symphony, System C’s former senior management team was brought back and is now leading the company as a new business.