Lewisham Hospital live with Cerner

Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust has gone live with Cerner Millennium at its University Hospital Lewisham site.

The go-live of the electronic patient record system had been pushed back several times, while the trust focused resources on the implementation of the system at the trust’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital in July last year.

However, Millennium finally went live over the weekend as a patient administration system, with eDischarge, maternity, theatres, TTAs and eVTE assessment.

Lewisham plans to roll-out clinical modules such as e-prescribing from 2017.

A trust spokesperson told Digital Health News that in preparing for go-live, specific workstreams were developed for key aspects of the project including governance structure, clinical areas, infrastructure and communications.

“Staff have been trained on the system and supported with additional staffing during the initial launch period,” the spokesperson said.

Queen Elizabeth Hospital was due to get the Cerner system delivered by BT under the London National Programme for IT contract with South London Healthcare NHS Trust.

The trust was dissolved in 2013 and merged with Lewisham Healthcare NHS Trust, which was also planning to implement Millennium under an individual contract with Cerner.

The two instances of Millennium now in place at the trust will be merged in 2017. This will be followed by the rollout of the full clinical suite including e-prescribing, nursing documentation and community.

A spokesperson for Cerner said: “Cerner is very happy to partner with Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust as it transitions to the Millennium electronic medical record at the Lewisham site.  It has been an exciting journey and we are looking forward to working together on their next steps toward a paperless organisation.”

According to minutes from the trust board’s meeting last June, the cost of deferring the go-live from last November to “early 2015” was going to be £850,000.