Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust, whose staff treat
500,000 patients a year from around the world, has run into
"significant" problems including system crashes, delays booking
patient appointments and data missing in records.
The difficulties raise questions about whether the trust's
board, under central pressure, went live too soon with Release 1 of
the Cerner Millennium Care Records Service. The trust had already
postponed go-live at least twice. It finally went live in June.
The Royal Free's board was told last week: "Some individual
clinics have genuinely struggled to manage the implementation of
Cerner. In the main these clinics tend to be those with the largest
volume of patients."
Appointments are said to have been lost in the system - and some
staff have told the local paper, the Camden New Journal, that there
have been
weeks of "chaos". One clinician said more time was being spent
on booking appointments than in his clinic treatment patients.
The Royal Free is the first NHS trust in England to go live with
the Cerner Millennium London Cluster Release 1 (LC1) of the Care
Records System from
BT Health, the local service provider for
London.
Cerner's LC1 links to the
NHS data spine and supports the use of electronic swipe cards
to access patient records.
Other trusts in London and the south of England have gone live
with Release 0 of the Cerner Care Records Service. The Care Records
Service - the roll out of which is
running four years late - is a central part of plans to build a
database of 50 million summary health records under the
NHS's £12.7bn National Programme for IT (NPfIT).
The Royal Free, which
is close to Hampstead Heath, has a leading
cancer centre. It is also renowned for its specialist treatment
centres. It has been preparing for the go-live of the Cerner system
for more than a year.
The trust says that its Cerner launch was "comparatively
successful when compared with other acute trusts". Barts and The
London NHS Trust
delayed cancer visits after its Cerner Release 0 go-live. The
deployment of a NPfIT Care Records System at Milton Keynes Hospital
NHS Foundation Trust "developed into an untenable situation which
resulted in near melt down of the organisation", according to
papers released to E-Health Insider under the Freedom of
Information Act.
Royal Free's board was told last week that some of the problems
were expected but not all. Executives have set up arrangements to
prioritise problems in such areas as the scheduling of operating
theatres, handling of inpatient waiting lists, outpatient clinics,
maternity, gynaecology, paediatric services, pathology, radiology
and nuclear medicine.
Analysis of this story on Tony Collins' IT Projects blog
>>
Barts and The London NHS Trust delays urgent cancer visits after
NPfIT go-live - IT Projects blog - June 2008
Royal Free hospital "chaos" - Camden New Journal -
July 2008
Bugs in Royal Free systems - Camden New Journal - July
2008
Minister defensive over Cerner NPfIT sites - IT Projects
blog - February 2008