Weston goes to tender

Weston Area Health NHS Trust has gone out to tender to replace its electronic patient record system beyond the end of its national contract in 2015.

The trust is looking for a single supplier for up to 12 years.

The trust received Cerner Millennium under NPfIT in 2007 and was one of seven sites in the South of England to be upgraded to the LC01 version by BT in 2011. The national contracts expire in October 2015.

The tender says the replacement system must include patient administration, A&E functionality and clinical documentation with a single solution from a single supplier.

“The chosen supplier must be able to demonstrate that their system has the capability to build and adapt over time towards a full electronic patient record including the use of a clinical portal,” it says.

“The trust also requires the provision of associated systems implementation services including, but not limited to, data migration, project management, technical implementation, interfacing with the trust integration engine, training, documentation, support and maintenance.”

Documents obtained by EHI under the Freedom of Information Act in early 2012 indicated the trust had mixed benefits from its Millennium implementation.

Of 12 key benefits, four had not been achieved, primarily because of lack of operational management of the change required.

Benefits listed included improvements in data quality and the percentage of patients receiving follow-up appointments before leaving hospital.

However, it was struggling to achieve targeted use of requesting via Millennium and described the creation of electronic discharge summaries via the system as “patchy”.

Weston is the fourth of nine southern trusts that are live with Cerner Millennium under NPfIT to go out to tender for a replacement system.

Weston is planning a staged process of competitive dialogue with between two and five bidders and requests to tender are due by 12 September.

The initial contract will be for seven years plus three years with an option to extend for another two years.

The tender does not indicate how much the trust is planning to spend.