Sunderland delays Meditech V6.0

City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust has delayed the deployment of Meditech’s electronic patient record version 6.0.

The trust has used Meditech since 1992, and was due to upgrade to V6.0 in October last year. It first deferred the deployment to December 2012 and this March decided to again put the go-live on hold.

The trust’s March board minutes said that a new date for implementation was yet to be set because the trust wanted to “ensure that the migration and system was robust”.

“Because the team were not happy with some of the data migration which was not tight enough during the testing period – the implementation date had been delayed further,” said the minutes.

However, EHI understands Sunderland is now planning to go-live with the system over the next bank holiday weekend, 25-27 May.

Sunderland runs the MAGIC version of the system and the trust has undergone a full system upgrade to the latest release approximately every two years.

It has expanded to 25 clinical and administrative modules that are used on a daily basis by almost 5,000 staff.

The trust said in September last year that it planned to create a new solution “from scratch”, using the software that has been “anglicised” as part of The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust EPR project.

Rotherham also delayed the go-live of the Meditech system, originally due to go-live in 2009, with no “fixed date” while it decided whether the system was ready to be implemented in a live environment.

Since the deployment in June last year, Rotherham has faced several operational issues with the EPR, and after an intervention by Monitor in February this year the trust hired an independent EPR expert to undertake a review of the system.

Rotherham, which has spent over £20m on the system to date, is now likely to ‘re-work’ the system and implement TPP’s SystmOne in A&E.