Two hospital trusts in the north of England are now live with a new joint electronic patient record.
Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust began the implementation of Cerner Millennium on Friday 22 September, with full rollout said to have been completed by Sunday 24 September.
Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust is also live with the system. It had initially been due to be deployed at the organisation in November 2016. As Digital Health News reported earlier in the year, however, the implementation was postponed due to “delays in the migration of data”.
Professor Clive Kay, chief executive at Bradford Teaching Hospitals, told Digital Health News the deployment represented “the largest deployment of an EPR system by Cerner in Europe to date – and we have been told it has been one of the most successful”.
The deployment involved 600 ‘EPR Friends’ – staff members who had received additional training and who offered guidance on the system’s use – as well as 170 ‘EPR Floorwalkers’, who’d worked on other go-live projects across the country, and 70 members of Cerner staff.
There were also 600 ‘EPR Volunteers’, who provided help to patients and members of the public during the go-live process.
Local paper the Telegraph & Argus reported there have so far only been four official patient complaints with an EPR aspect at Bradford.
“EPR represents one of the biggest changes to patient care that many of us will have witnessed,” Prof. Kay told Digital Health News.
“This has been a huge undertaking for the trust but I am delighted with the way that everyone has embraced the change. The positive move to EPR has been a true reflection of just what we can achieve when we work together for a shared goal of transforming our hospital and improving patient care.”
Added director of informatics Cindy Fedell: “Staff have done exceptionally well in preparing for and embracing the change. EPR offers a tremendous opportunity to continue to innovate and transform front-line clinical care through digital tools and information.”
Bradford Teaching Hospitals and Calderdale and Huddersfield inked the deal for Cerner Millennium back in 2015, following the 2014 announcement of a tender for a £30m contract.
At Calderdale and Huddersfield, which runs two main hospitals as well as a number of community services, an in-house patient administration system had been in place since 1985.
At Bradford Teaching Hospitals – which serves around 500,000 people in communities across Yorkshire, and provides specialist services for about double that number – the new EPR replaces iPM, which was installed as part of the National Programme for IT.
As previously reported by Digital Health News, Bradford is part of the Connected Health Cities project, which aims to improve healthcare across the north of England by giving academics access to health data.
26 October 2017 @ 16:59
Well done, great to hear about another successful EPR rollout. I am also impressed to see how many staff from the trust and Cerners were able to be on hand to help too, it is so important to have lots of helpers on the day.
Is there a map anywhere of UK EPR deployments? It would be useful to see the trusts that have each type of EPR, and those that are still implementing theirs, as well as any trusts that have not started yet.
26 October 2017 @ 13:06
This article is not entirely accurate. Calderdale and Huddersfield went live in May 2017 and Bradford in September as reported.
Congratulations to all those involved in both deployments in making it a success.
25 October 2017 @ 17:13
Nearly fifteen years ago I spent several weeks as part of the team receiving and helping to analyse and report on bids received from potential suppliers to be awarded contracts for the “NHS National Programme for Information Technology (NPfIT)”. Those of you as elderly as I am will remember that two suppliers were awarded contracts for the supply of an “Electronic Patient Record (EPR)” System, one of which was Cerner who pitched with Cerner Millennium (CM). Since then, several trusts have taken and partially implemented CM, some through NPfIT, others by an alternative procurement method. Some trusts who did still have it in place; others have abandoned it and replaced it with alternative IT product(s) (e.g., North Bristol et al). Consequently, I can’t help but laugh at the fact that fifteen years down the road, it’s being reported that BTH and C&H have recently achieved a successful and apparently wholesale implementation of CM. Congratulations to all concerned since I never thought I’d live to see it! Hopefully, CM has benefited from 15 years of updating and modernisation in the meantime.