- Smart Healthcare, Thursday 12 November 2009 09.00 GMT
Kevin Jarrold said the plan to establish 130 polyclinics across the city is "the kind of radical transformation of services that is critically dependent on IT".
He told the e-Health Insider conference in Birmingham on 9 November 2009 that NHS London has started two "very modest" pilots in existing polyclinics, to provide a single system for reception desks which links to GPs, secondary and mental health services within the building.
The polyclinics would not see the wholesale replacement of existing IT, he said. "I think there was an assumption that existing GP solutions would be replaced. We moved away from that some time ago," he said.
But he added: "There is a challenge for both the NHS and suppliers as to what the IT for polyclinics may look like."
NHS London, the city's strategic health authority, is also hoping for a city-wide implementation of the NHS Summary Care Record. It is running a pilot of using records for end-of-life care with the London Ambulance Service.
Jarrold said that the English NHS had been wrong previously to insist on the same systems for everyone. "We made a mistake in trying to drive through a standard one size fits all solution," he said.
Jarrold said that four hospitals in London are using Cerner's Milllennium suite of software, each tailored to their circumstances. He said that Kingston Hospital NHS Trust will go live at the end of November, while St George's Healthcare NHS Trust will follow in the following weeks.
London is using difference software for different sectors of the capital's health organisations. All of London's primary care trusts bar one have installed, or are installing, RiO software for their community based services.
The exception is what Jarrold described as "the People's Republic of Croydon," although he did not expand on why the south London borough had avoided RiO.
