Sherwood live with Medway PAS

Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with its Medway patient administration system.

EHI reported earlier this year that the trust decided to take the PAS from System C in September last year, but during the implementation work it encountered problems using the system’s referral to treatment functionality with existing trust processes.

At the time, the trust said that the problems could impact the trust’s ability to correctly report RTT waiting times, once it has gone live with the system. However, despite this, the trust decided to go ahead with the October go-live.

In a statement, the trust’s PAS project manager, Colin Mooney said: “The project team have been working tirelessly for over a year to develop and test the new system. This involves moving 950,000 records from the current Totalcare system to the new Medway system.”

The trust told EHI it went live with several modules, including: a master patient index,  outpatients including 18 week referral to treatment time tracking;  outpatient scheduling and clinic management;  inpatients; bed management; clinical coding;  information and reporting management ; waiting list management; and  case note tracking.

System C, which, along with the rest of McKesson UK, apart from the workforce and imagind divisions of the company, was recently bought by American company Symphony Technology Group, has deployed the Medway PAS to 12 trusts in the last 12 months.

Paul O’Connor, the trust’s chief executive, said in a statement that the go-live is a “major milestone” towards an electronic patient record system and in driving to improve service.

“The new system will benefit patients because it will capture information about their whole journey within the hospital allowing doctors, nurses and support staff to access information in one place,” he said.

EHI understands that the trust is still in dialogue with System C over issues with the reporting of the RTT waiting times.

Earlier this year, System C’s joint chief executive Markus Bolton said that the RTT workflow at Sherwood is different to that in use at other Medway sites, “so we have not come across this issue before.”