The Southern region of the £6bn National Programme for NHS IT has its first major hospital up and running on Cerner’s patient administration software.
The 350-bed general district hospital in Weston-super-Mare went live with the patient administration system at the end of last month with no more than slight teething problems, says Weston Area Health Trust IT director Yvonne Preece.
The implementation is being watched because the software has been chosen as the replacement for the GE Healthcare system that was recently dropped in the London region.
Cerner only took over the South when IDX was replaced last summer. When the London decision was taken last month, it was considered largely untried because it had only completed a troubled project at the small Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre.
The new software replaces an obsolete, green-screen standalone system with an administration package integrated into other hospital functions such as clinical test results and consultant appointments. It will also link to the electronic X-ray technology due to go live in November.
Previously manual processes, such as updating casualty department whiteboards or looking for spare beds, are also now managed electronically.
‘This is a very significant change in the way the hospital is run and the way people do their jobs,’ said Preece.
Weston is the first of a handful of major Cerner implementations in the South-West this autumn. How the system performs in the coming weeks will be the real test, says Preece.
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