The Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has signed a 15-year agreement to implement the Cerner Millennium electronic patient record (EPR) system.
Cerner Millennium will replace the Meditech EPR that has been in use at the trust since 1999.
Meditech’s contract expires in November 2019.
Observations, notes and records will now be entered and stored digitally, enabling doctors and nurses to have immediate access to information when treating patients across the hospital.
The trust said the agreement with Cerner was part of its “commitment to providing safe, kind and effective care in the digital era.”
Chief executive, Tony Chambers, said: “It is our duty to provide safe, kind and effective care for the people of West Cheshire and shifting our processes from analogue to digital is a huge part of that.
“Every day the NHS operates at the forefront of science clinically, but so much of the technology being used to support that is outdated.
“This represents another huge step towards our goal of becoming The Model Hospital.”
The Countess of Chester Hospital is a Fast Follower of Wirral University Teaching Hospital, which has been using Cerner since 2010.
The trust plans to integrate the new EPR with its Co-ordination Centre, a technology programme implemented in 2017 aimed at improving logistical processes.
The system uses patient flow technology designed to help reduce the time people spend in hospital, by improving bed management.
Some 4,000 sensors installed throughout the trust help provide a real-time picture of the hospital, giving the location of tagged equipment and picking up data from badges and electronic wristbands.
Information is then sent to a Co-ordination Centre, which acts “like an air traffic control room”.
The trust said that implementing this sensor system with the Cerner EPR would be a first-of-a-kind for the UK.
The Cerner Millennium EPR system is currently used by 22 NHS trusts in England.
The latest organisation to deploy the system, West Middlesex Hospital, went live in May.
18 June 2018 @ 13:57
Not sure why Trust management are not aware that observations, notes and records at the Trust have been entered and stored digitally since the early 2000’s, so the move to Cerner is nothing new. I looks like the only new thing is an interface to the tracking system ?
14 June 2018 @ 09:04
Well done Cerner