Newcastle-upon-Tyne NHS Foundation Trust Hospitals, which runs two health centres in the city for the local primary care trust, wants to send patient discharge information electronically their GPs as part of the next phase of its Cerner Millennium project.
"One of the concerns that patients have is that, in the scale of the NHS, things become fragmented," David Allison, the trust's chief operating officer, told SmartHealthcare.com. "We want to move to electronic information, where we can provide data out there quickly."
Many hospitals currently sent patient discharge information to their GPs by post.
The trust set up the two health centres with the government's encouragement, at Battle Hill in the east of the city and Cowgate in the west, through a holding company, as both areas have too few family doctors. It is planning to develop further health centres and polyclinics, following Lord Darzi's recommendations.
Allison said he was pleased with the first few weeks of using an implementation of Cerner it has bought from University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre (UPMC) for an undisclosed, but multi-million pound, sum. "So far, we feel it's gone very well," he said.
The trust went live with patient administration elements of the Millennium suite of software on 7 November across the whole organisation, and followed this with theatre scheduling as part of a phased approach to introducing the system.
On 27 November it started using the accident and emergency system at the Newcastle General hospital, and on 30 November it went live with software for clinical events, including electronic prescribing and order communications, the latter being used to automate orders for processing blood and other samples from laboratories.
Allison said that Newcastle Hospitals had chosen UPMC as its source for the system so it could take advantage of its experience in a similar city with an industrial legacy. "Pittsburgh has a very similar heritage to the north-east of England. We went to see how they were running their hospitals. What we've done is transfer those systems into the UK setting."
He said that the biggest problem so far had been staff forgetting their passwords: "That was an indication that things were going pretty well."
Allison said that the transfer of patient data from the previous McKesson system to Cerner Millennium was "quite an exercise, just because of the scale," with the trust seeing more than 1m patients each year.
"I don't think we could have done much more training, but there is always a big difference between sitting in a classroom and real time," he added. "We've got people floor walking (to help users) but I guess we wish we'd got more people through training."
;
