Category Archives: Cerner

Uupublished plan to throw another £13bn at the NHS’s IT problems?

Posted on 16/10/2018 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

The Health Service Journal yesterday revealed details of NHS IT investment plans that have been costed at about £12.9bn over the next five years.

The HSJ’s award-winning technology correspondent Ben Heather  says the sums currently involved – which could reduce as proposals are “reined in” – are on a par with the notorious National Programme for IT in the NHS.

He says that officials working on the plan have produced an estimate of between £10.9bn and £12.9bn for the cost of supporting proposals across 15 long-term plan “workstreams” ranging from creating personalised care to improving cancer survival.

The figures form part of the work of the digital and technology workstream for the long term plan, which is being developed by NHS England and NHS Improvement.

“The sum would be on par with the National Programme for IT, the most expensive push to improve IT systems in NHS history and an infamously costly and troubled project. It is likely to reduce substantially, however, as ambitions for the plan are negotiated and reined in over coming weeks.”

The plan is due to be published in late November or early December. The health secretary is known to be a keen advocate of new IT-related investments.

It is likely that a sizeable portion of the new £20bn planned for the NHS – which will be financed partly by tax increases that are due to be announced in the budget later this month – will go on NHS technology.

But the Health Service Journal suggests the investments will be controlled centrally, which may be a bad sign given that one of the major flaws in the failed £13bn NPfIT was that money was controlled centrally rather than by local groups of doctors and nurses.

Comment

On the face of it the current investment proposals bear no resemblance to the NHS IT programme NPfIT which was “dismantled” in 2011.

The NPfIT comprised a handful of specific major projects that were to be implemented nationally under the umbrella of “ruthless standardisation”.

The current proposals look very different. The investments fall into vague categories such as digitalising secondary care, improvements to IT infrastructure, data gathering and analytics.

The proposals have all the appearance of a different way the NHS has found to waste vast sums of public money.

It has never been acknowledged by the Treasury, NHS England or the Department of Health that the NPfIT wasted billions on spending that was invisible to the public, such as numerous consultants, years of globe-trotting by officials, first-class hotels across the world, sponsored conferences and unreported funds for marketing items that included DVDs and board games designed especially to promote the IT programme.

For officials, there’s nothing more exciting than going to work on a £13bn technology programme where money flows more freely than water. It’s no wonder officialdom is lobbying for the money.

No doubt it will be easy for officials to obtain the new billions. At any time in the recent history of the NHS it would have been easy on paper to justify £13bn for new NHS technology. Much of the £13bn could be justified simply enough by submitting plans to HM Treasury to modernise what already exists.

It was easy to justify the NPfIT. Tony Blair approved it at a Downing Street meeting that lasted 40 minutes. Computer Weekly obtained minutes of the Downing Street meeting after various FOI appeals.

But the NHS needs £13bn to be spent wisely on technology. The last thing the NHS needs is for Whitehall officials to be involved. History shows that Whitehall has the reverse Midas touch when it comes to major NHS IT investments. It is local groups of doctors and nurses who know how to spend the money wisely.

If either NHS England or the Department of Health and Social Care is involved in the new proposals for NHS IT investments – and they both are – it’s almost certain the new plans will end up as costly failures.

How would the public feel if they realised that a sizeable portion of their increased taxes for the NHS is almost certainly destined for the dustbin marked “mismanaged Whitehall IT schemes”.

Revealed: Officials’ £13bn funding ask to modernise NHS IT

Another NPfIT scandal in the making?

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Posted in Agile, BT, BT Health, Campaign4Change, Cerner, consultants, Department of Health, excessive secrecy, Freedom of Information, Fujitsu, GDS, Government IT, health records, Institute for Government, IT-enabled projects and waste, IT-related failures, NHS, NHS England, npfit

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What do Ben Bradshaw, Caroline Flint and Andy Burnham have in common?

Posted on 18/06/2015 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

Ben Bradshaw, Caroline Flint and Andy Burnham have in common in their political past something they probably wouldn’t care to draw attention to as they battle for roles in the Labour leadership.

Few people will remember that Bradshaw, Flint and Burnham were advocates – indeed staunch defenders – of what’s arguably the biggest IT-related failure of all time – the £10bn National Programme for IT [NPfIT.

Perhaps it’s unfair to mention their support for such a massive failure at the time of the leadership election.

A counter argument is that politicians should be held to account at some point for public statements they have made in Parliament in defence of a major project – in this case the largest non-military IT-related programme in the world – that many inside and outside the NHS recognised was fundamentally flawed from its outset in 2003.

Bradshaw, Flint and Burnham did concede in their NPfIT-related statements to the House of Commons that the national programme for IT had its flaws, but still they gave it their strong support and continued to attack the programme’s critics.

The following are examples of statements made by Bradshaw, Flint and Burnham in the House of Commons in support of the NPfIT, which was later abandoned.

Bradshaw, then health minister in charge of the NPfIT,  told the House of Commons in February 2008:

“We accept that there have been delays, not only in the roll-out of summary care records, but in the whole NHS IT programme.

“It is important to put on record that those delays were not because of problems with supply, delivery or systems, but pretty much entirely because we took extra time to consult on and try to address record safety and patient confidentiality, and we were absolutely right to do so…

“The health service is moving from being an organisation with fragmented or incomplete information systems to a position where national systems are integrated, record keeping is digital, patients have unprecedented access to their personal health records and health professionals will have the right information at the right time about the right patient.

“As the Health Committee has recognised in its report, the roll-out of new IT systems will save time and money for the NHS and staff, save lives and improve patient care.”

[Even today, 12 years after the launch of the National Programme for IT, the NHS does not have integrated digital records.]

Caroline Flint, then health minister in charge of the NPfIT,  told the House of Commons on 6 June 2007:

“… it is lamentable that a programme that is focused on the delivery of safer and more efficient health care in the NHS in England has been politicised and attacked for short-term partisan gain when, in fact, it is to the benefit of everyone using the NHS in England that the programme is provided with the necessary resources and support to achieve the aims that Conservative Members have acknowledged that they agree with…

“Owing to delays in some areas of the programme, far from it being overspent, there is an underspend, which is perhaps unique for a large IT programme.

“The contracts that were ably put in place in 2003 mean that committed payments are not made to suppliers until delivery has been accepted 45 days after “go live” by end-users.

“We have made advance payments to a number of suppliers to provide efficient financing mechanisms for their work in progress. However, it should be noted that the financing risk has remained with the suppliers and that guarantees for any advance payments have been made by the suppliers to the Government…

“The national programme for IT in the NHS has successfully transferred the financing and completion risk to its suppliers…”

Andy Burnham, then Health Secretary, told the House of Commons on 7 December 2009:

“He [Andrew Lansley] seems to reject the benefits of a national system across the NHS, but we do not. We believe that there are significant benefits from a national health service having a programme of IT that can link up clinicians across the system. We further believe that it is safer for patients if their records can be accessed across the system…” [which hasn’t happened].

Abandoned NHS IT plan has cost £10bn so far

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Posted in BT, Campaign4Change, Cerner, change management, Choose and Book, CSC, Department of Health, e-health, Fujitsu, Government IT, health, health records, IT-related failures, LPfIT, npfit, procurement, project management, SPfIT

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Medication errors 6 months after “admin” system goes live

Posted on 19/06/2014 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

When Croydon Health Services NHS Trust went live with Cerner Millennium in October 2013 a spokesman told eHealth Insider:

“The new system will give everyone working at the trust better access to information and an accurate picture of what all of our services are doing. This will allow staff to make quicker, more informed decisions about the care patients need. It will improve the quality, safety and efficiency of care.”

The go-live has indeed brought some benefits. The trust says these include more efficient management of medicines, more detailed patient information being conveyed between shifts and departments, and better management of beds.

But earlier this week Campaign4Change reported on some of the problems associated with the go-live including 50,000 patients on the trust’s waiting list and a “serious incident” declared over diagnostic waits including extended waits for patients with suspected cancer.

Said the trust’s Audit Committee in March 2014 – 6 months after the go-live of the Cerner Millennium Care Records Service [CRS] :

“CRS Millennium Lessons Learned

“KB [COO and Deputy Chief Executive] outlined the context in which the implementation of CRS had taken place from the time the Business case had been approved in 2010 to the commencement of deployment in January 2011 and its subsequent implementation to date.

“She noted the 7 official “go live” dates which were reflected in the lessons learned report many of which fell during a period of organisational change.

“She noted that the deployment in CHS [Croydon Health Services NHS Trust] had been the most comprehensive deployment to take place nationally.

“It was noted that Programme Team had considered the lessons learned from other [NPfIT] Care Records Service deployments as part of the implementation programme at CHS and that there was no evidence of harm to patients despite the challenges around delivery of service.

” However significant operational challenges were experienced and a deep dive into the implementation of CRS was carried out and the findings submitted to the Finance & Performance Committee and the Trust Development Authority.

“In relation to ‘no harm to patients’ SC [Chairman] asked what empirical evidence there was to support the findings of the Deep Dive.

“KB explained from October 2013 to date there were 50,000 patients on the waiting list, but a patient validation exercise had taken place which had confirmed that no patients had come to any harm.

“The potential backlog would be cleared by the end of March but in the meantime those patients on waiting lists would be subject to a further clinical review to ensure that there was no harm.”

In fact the trust is still working through the backlogs; and long waiting times are not the only matters arising from the Cerner Millennium implementation. A medication safety report for the month of March 2004 highlights these lessons:

“The patient was prescribed Furosemide for acute pulmonary oedema on 12/03/2014. The drug was not administered and the reason not documented. On review of the incident, it was identified that there was a mis-communication between both nurses and the fact that they have started using a new computer system had caused confusion which led to the error. Once error identified the dose was given and ward sister has ensured that staff will go for further training if unsure on how to use the CRS Millennium system…

“Third incident was a failure to administer fluids (Normal Saline) in an acute kidney injury patient with an admission creatinine of greater than 700. Again there was confusion with the electronic prescribing system and the nurse thought that patient did not have a drug chart as the electronic prescribing system had gone live whereas in fact there was a paper drug chart for the fluid. The position of the venflon on the patient arm also contributed to the delay. Once error identified the fluids were given but were not running to time and patient improved. Ward sister has ensured that staff will go for further training if unsure on how to use the CRS Millennium system and staff were also briefed about poor documentation of the incident…

“Fourth incident occurred involved a patient prescribed ACS protocol for NSTEMI, Positive trop T. The aspirin 300mg, clopidogrel 300mg and fondaparinux 2.5mg were not administered and not signed for. Omission of medicines was discussed with doctor looking after the patient and the patient did not come to any harm. Omission occurred as agency staff did not know how to use CRS Millennium. On review of incident all staff were briefed on importance of patients being administered medicines on time and in particular a discussion took place between agency staff and for agency staff to have adequate CRS Millennium training. There are champion users nurses on wards who are able to train Agency staff.

NPfIT

Cerner Millennium is provided to the trust under a national contract hosted by the Department of Health and managed via a Local Service Provider (LSP) contract with BT. The contract covers trusts in London and the south of England.

The DH contract expires on 31st October 2015 after which point the DH will no longer fund any of the services currently hosted by them. This includes both the software and licencing costs for Cerner Millennium as well as the BT data storage facilities and other costs.

The DH requires all trusts with Cerner under the NPfIT to commit to an exit strategy before 31st October 2015.

Comment

Is Cerner Millennium merely an administrative system as officials at Croydon Health Services NHS Trust claim it is?  The implication is, with an administrative system, that it cannot be involved in any harm to patients. Officials at Connecting for Health when they ran the NPfIT used to describe Cerner Millennium as an administrative system.

It is the deployment of this “admin” system at Croydon that is implicated in medication errors, a waiting list of 50,000 people, and long waits for diagnostic tests for people with suspected cancer.

If Whitehall and NHS officials cannot see the system as other than administrative, this is a mistake that may help to explain why a poor service for patients, which sometimes has serious potential clinical implications,  is so commonplace, even months after go-live.

50,000 on waiting list and cancer test delays after NPfIT go-live

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Posted in BT, BT Health, Campaign4Change, Cerner, Department of Health, e-health, health, health records, LPfIT, NHS, npfit, project management, public sector, public services, public-private partnerships, SPfIT

50,000 on waiting list and cancer test delays after NPfIT go-live

Posted on 17/06/2014 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

Croydon hospitals have built up a waiting list of 50,000 patients since a Cerner electronic patient record system go-live last October, according the trust’s latest board papers.

And, since the go-live, more than 2,200 patients have waited at least 6 weeks for diagnostic tests, of which 160 have been identified as “urgent suspected cancer and urgent patients”.  This backlog may take until the end of August to clear, say the board papers of the Croydon Health Services NHS Trust which includes Croydon’s Mayday Hospital, now the University Hospital.

The trust has declared a “serious incident” as a result of the diagnostics backlog. An SI can be reported when there is possibility of unexpected or avoidable death or severe harm to one or more patients.

“No harm”

The trust concedes that its waiting times pose a “potential clinical risk” but the board papers say several times that there is no evidence any patient has come to harm.  This assurance has been questioned by some trust board members. The trust continues to investigate.

Croydon is the latest in a long line of trusts to have had serious disruption after a Cerner go-live under the NPfIT, with BT as the installation partner.

The trust has kept the implications for patients confidential. This may contravene the NHS’s “duty of candour” – to report publicly on things that go wrong. The duty has come about in the wake of the suffering of hundreds of people in the care of Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust.

Croydon Health Services NHS Trust has decided not to publish its “Cerner Deep Dive” or Cerner “Lessons Learnt” reports, and discussions on the reports have been in Part 2 confidential sections of board meetings.

The trust defended its “Part 2” approach in its statement (below).

Meanwhile the Health and Social Care Information Centre, which runs the NPfIT local service provider contracts, including BT’s agreement to supply Cerner to hospitals in London,  has commissioned Cerner to capture the benefits nationally of Cerner installations.

Q&A

My questions and points to the trust, and its responses are below.

From me to the trust:

Croydon had good reasons to go live with Cerner, and DH funding was a further incentive but the trust does not appear to have been in a position to go live – at any stage – with a Big Bang Cerner implementation. The 7 aborted official go-live dates might have been a sign of why.  It would have been a brave decision to cancel the implementation, especially as:

–  the trust had spent 2 years preparing for it

– DH, BT and Cerner had put a lot of work into it

– there was DH pressure to go live especially after all the missed go-live dates.

The latest board papers say 6 or more times in different places that there has been no harm to patients as a result of the delays and waits.  Some members have raised questions on this and there is the matter of whether the trust is commissioning its own assessments (marking its own work).

On this:

– 50,000 on waiting list

– Cerner deep dive not published

– Lessons Learnt not published (concealment of failures, against the spirit of duty of candour called for by Robert Francis QC and Jeremy Hunt?)

– Diagnostics – an SI reported. The trust has considered the contributing issues which related to Cerner implementation but has not published details of the discussion. Again a concealment of failures?

– An accumulation of over 2,200 patients that were waiting over 6 weeks for diagnostics. Out of that number 160 patients were identified as urgent suspected cancer (USC) and urgent patients.  Can the trust – and patients – be sure there has been no harm?

– “… external assurance through an external clinician will provide the assurance that no patients have suffered harm as a result of the length of the waiting times”. Bringing in an external clinician to provide an assurance no patients have been harmed seems to pre-judge the outcome.  The trust appears to be marking its own work, especially as the backlog of patients awaiting diagnostics may not be cleared until the end of August.

– Managing public and GP perceptions? “Members agreed that GP interactions should be held off until the investigations had produced definite findings. However the Communications Department are on standby to publish information to GPs if required, and the Trust is ready to react to other enquiries. The Trust will in any event publish the incident report after the investigation has been completed.”

– “… the implementation of Cerner in October 2013 had an impact on activity levels and the delivery of RTT standards”. Again no report on this published.

– “An independent assessor would re-check all patients to assure that no harm has resulted. The Committee noted the progress report and requested that this is referred to a Part 2 meeting of the Trust Board …” Concealment of failures again?

– In the past the DH has been prepared to treat patients as guinea pigs in Cerner Big Bang implementations. The philosophy appears to be that the implementations will inevitably be disruptive but it’s for the good of patients in the longer term. That this approach may be unfair on patients in the short term, however, seems not to trouble the NHS hierarchy.

It’s clear clinicians and IT staff are doing their best and working hard for the benefit of patients but the implementation was beyond their control. Meanwhile complaints are increasing, Croydon Health Services was one of the lowest rated trusts for overall patient experience and a sizeable minority of local residents don’t choose the local hospitals for care or treatment. That said some patients rate their care very highly on NHS Choices (although some don’t). The University hospital is rated 2.5 stars out of 5.

One of the most surprising statements in the board papers is this: “… despite the weaknesses in the programme, the overall success of the deployment had been recognised at a national level”. A success? Can the trust in essence say what it likes? Nobody knows for sure what the facts are, given that the trust decides on what to publish and not to publish.

The trust’s response to the above points and questions:

“Due to a temporary failure of our administrative systems, the Trust found in February 2014 that a number of patients who needed to be seen by the imaging service were in breach of the six week waiting standard.

“We have taken immediate action to correct this and are undertaking a thorough review to confirm that no patients were harmed as a result.  The Trust is now working hard to treat patients currently on our waiting lists.  This is referenced in our publicly available Board papers.

“CRS Millennium has delivered a number of improvements that support improving patient experience at the Trust, including more efficient management of medicines, more detailed patient information being conveyed between shifts and departments and better management of beds within the organisation.”

Lessons?

Below are some of the lessons from Croydon’s Cerner go-live. Although the trust hasn’t published its “Lessons Learnt” report, some of lessons are mentioned in its latest board papers:

  • Insufficient engagement from operational and clinical colleagues
  • Time pressures were felt when a full dress rehearsal stretched the capabilities of the information team.
  • Insufficient time and resources were allocated to completion of the outline business and full business cases, as well as to due diligence on the options and costs.  [Business cases for Cerner are still unpublished.]
  • Trust directors agreed that a business case for a project of the size and complexity of the CRS Millennium should have taken longer than 6 weeks to prepare.
  • A failure of senior managers to take stock of the project at its key stages.
  • Too strong a focus on technical aspects
  • Clinicians not always fully appreciating the impact of the changes the system would deliver
  • The hiring of an external change manager to lead the deployment who proved to be “less than wholly successful because of the resulting deficiency in previous experience or knowledge of the culture of the organisation”.
  • The individual left the organisation part way through deployment which led to further challenges.
  • The right people with the right skills mix were not in place at the outset to achieve the transformational change necessary to successfully deploy a new system such as CRS

Comment 

NHS trusts have good reason to modernise their IT using the widely-installed  Cerner electronic patient record system, especially  if it’s a go-live under the remnants of the NPfIT, in which case hospitals receive DH funding and gain from having BT as their installation partner.

But why does a disruption that borders on chaos so often follow NPfIT Cerner implementations? Perhaps it’s partly because the benefits of Cerner, and the extra work required by nurses and doctors and clerical staff to harvest the benefits, is underestimated.

It is in any case difficult to convey to busy NHS staff that the new technology will, in the short-term, require an increase in their workload. Staff and clinicians will need to capture more data than they did on the old system, and with precision. The new technology will change how they work, so doctors may resent it initially, especially as there may be shortcomings in the way it has been implemented which will take time to identify and solve.

The problem with NPfIT go-lives is that they take place in an accountability void. Nobody is held responsible when things go badly wrong, and it’s easy for trusts to play down what has gone wrong. They have no fear of authoritative contradiction because they keep their implementation assessments confidential.

What a difference it would make if trusts had an unequivocal duty of candour over electronic health record – EHR – deployments. They would not be able to go live until they were ready.

The disruption that has followed NPfIT Cerner go-lives has been serious. Appointments and tests for suspected cancer have been lost in the administrative confusion that follows go-live. There have been backlogs of appointments for tens of thousands of patients. Operating theatres have gone under-used because of mis-scheduled appointments.

Now and again a patient may die unnecessarily but the problems have been regarded by the NHS centrally as collateral damage, the price society pays for the technological modernisation of the NHS.

Richard Granger, when head of the NPfIT, said he was ashamed of some Cerner installations. He described some of them as “appalling” but since he made his comments in 2007, some of the Cerner installations have been more disruptive than those he was referring to.

Provided each time there is no incontrovertible evidence of harm to patients as a result of a go-live, officials give the go ahead for more NPfIT Cerner installations.

Guinea pigs?

Disruption after go-live is too often treated as an administrative problem. Croydon’s statement refers to a “temporary problem with our administrative systems”. But new patient record systems can harm patients, as the inquest on 3-year-old Samuel Starr heard.

It’s time officials stopped regarding patients as guinea pigs in IT go-lives. It compounds the lack of accountability when trusts such as Croydon keep the reports from the go-live secret.

Trusts need better technological support but not at the cost of treating any harm to patients as collateral damage.

A tragic outcome for Cerner implementation at Bath?

Openness and honesty is a rarity after health IT problems

Mishandled electronic health record transition

A botched Cerner EHR implementation?

Trinity Medical Center reaches Cerner settlement

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Posted in BT, BT Health, Campaign4Change, Cerner, Department of Health, health, health records, HSCIC, LPfIT, NHS, npfit, openness and transparency, SPfIT

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CEO and CIO resign after troubled EHR go-live

Posted on 05/06/2014 | Leave a comment

By Tony Collins

At the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Georgia, in America’s deep south, about 70 miles from Atlanta, is Athens .

It was named at the turn of the 19th century to associate its university with Aristotle and Plato’s academy in Greece. It is home to the Athens Regional Medical Centre, one of the USA’s top hospitals.

There on 4 May 2014 the Centre went live with what it described as the most meaningful and largest scale information technology system in its 95-year history – a Cerner EHR implementation.

Now the Centre’s CEO James Thaw and CIO Gretchen Tegethoff have resigned. The Centre’s implementation of the electronic health record system seems to have been no more or less successful than at UK hospitals.

The main difference is that more than a dozen doctors complained in a letter to Thaw and Tegethoff.  A doctor leaked their letter to the local paper.

“Medication errors”

The letter said the timescales to install the Cerner EHR system were too “aggressive” and there was a “lack of readiness” among the intended users. They called the system cumbersome.

The letter referred to “medication errors … orders being lost or overlooked … (emergency department) and patients leaving after long waits”. An inpatient wasn’t seen by a physician for five days.

“The Cerner implementation has driven some physicians to drop their active staff privileges at ARMC [Athens Regional Medical Centre],” said the letter. “This has placed an additional burden on the hospitalists, who are already overwhelmed. Other physicians are directing their patients to St. Mary’s (an entirely separate local hospital) for outpatient studies, (emergency room) care, admissions and surgical procedures. … Efforts to rebuild the relationships with patients and physicians (needs) to begin immediately.”

The boldness of the letter has won praise in parts of the wider American health IT community.

It was signed by the centre’s most senior medical representatives: Carolann Eisenhart, president of the medical staff; Joseph T. Johnson, vice president of the medical staff; David M. Sailers, surgery department chair; and, Robert D. Sinyard, medicine department chair.

A doctor who provided the letter to the Athens Banner-Herald refused a request to openly discuss the issues with the computer system and asked to remain anonymous at the urging of his colleagues.

Swift action

One report said that at a meeting of medical staff 200 doctors were “solid in their vote of no confidence in the present hospital administration.”

Last week Thaw wrote in an email to staff: “From the moment our physician leadership expressed concern about the Cerner I.T. conversion process on May 15, we took swift action and significant progress has been made toward resolving the issues raised … Providing outstanding patient care is first and foremost in our minds at Athens Regional, and we have dedicated staff throughout the hospital to make sure the system is functioning as smoothly as possible through this transition.”

UK implications?

The problems at the Athens centre raise questions about whether problematic Cerner installations in the NHS should have consequences for CEOs.  Health IT specialists say that, done well, EHR implementations can improve the chances of a successful recovery. Done badly an EHR implementation can harm patients and contribute to death.

The most recent installations of Cerner in the NHS, at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Croydon Health Services NHS Trust, follow the pattern of other Cerner EHR go-lives in the NHS where there have been hints of problems but the trusts are refusing to publish a picture of how patients are being affected.

What has gone wrong at Athens Regional?

IT staff, replying to the Banner-Herald’s article, have given informed views on what has gone wrong. It appears that the Athens Regional laid off about a third of the IT staff in February 2014, about three months before go-live.

Past project disasters have shown that organisations often need more, not fewer, IT staff, advisers and helpers, at the time of a major go-live.

A further problem is that there appears to have been little understanding or support among doctors for the changes they would need to make in their business practices to accommodate the new system.  Had the organisation done enough to persuade doctors and nurses of the benefits to them of changing their ways of working?

If clinicians do not support the need for change, they may focus unduly on what is wrong with the new system. An organisation that is inherently secretive and resentful of constructive criticism will further alienate doctors and nurses.

Doctors who fully support an EHR implementation may find ways around problems, without complaining.

One comment on the Banner-Herald website says:

“While I have moved on from Athens Regional, I still have many friends and colleagues that are trying to work through this mess. Here is some information that has been reported to me…

“Medications, labs and diagnostic exams are not getting done in a timely manner or even missed all together. Some of this could be training issues and some system.

“Already over worked clinical staff are having to work many extra hours to get all the information in the system. This obviously takes away from patient care.

“Senior leadership tried to implement the system in half the amount of time that is usually required to do such things, with half the staff needed to do it. Why?

“Despite an environment of fear and intimidation the clinical staff involved with the project warned senior administration that the system was not ready to implement and posed a safety risk.

“I have ex-colleagues that know staff and directors that are involved with the project. They have made a valiant effort to make things right. Apparently an 80 to even a 100 hour work week has been the norm of late.

“Some questions that I have: where does the community hospital board stand with all this? Were they asking the questions that need to be asked? Why would the software company agree to do such a tight timeline? Shouldn’t they have to answer some questions as well?”

“Hopefully, this newspaper will continue to investigate what has happened here and not cave to an institution that spends a lot of money on frequent giant full page ads.

“Please remember there are still good people (staff, managers and administrators) that work at ARMC and I am sure they care about the community they serve and will make sure they provide great patient care.”

“The last three weeks have been very challenging for our physicians, nurses, and staff,” said Athens Regional Foundation Vice President Tammy Gilland. “Parts of the system are working well while others are not. The medical staff leadership has been active in relaying their concerns to the administration and the administration has taken these concerns very seriously. Maintaining the highest quality of patient care has always been the guiding principle of Athens Regional Health System.”

Keeping quiet

NHS trusts go quiet about the effect on patients of EHR implementations despite calls by Robert Francis QC and health secretary Jeremy Hunt for openness when things go wrong.

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, which comprises St Mary’s Paddington, Hammersmith Hospital, Charing Cross Hospital, Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital, and Western Eye hospital in Marylebone Road, went live with Cerner– but its managers and CEO are refusing to say what effect the system is having on patients.

An FOI request by eHealth Insider elicited the fact that Imperial College Healthcare had 55 different consultants working on the Cerner Millennium project and 45 Trust staff. The internal budget for electronic patient record deployment was £14m.

Croydon Health Services NHS Trust, which comprises Croydon University Hospital (formerly Mayday) and the Purley War Memorial Hospital, went live with Cerner last year, also under BT’s direction.

The trust has been a little more forthcoming than Imperial about the administrative disruption, unforeseen extra  costs and effects on patients, but Croydon’s officials, like Imperial College Healthcare’s spokespeople,  refuse to give any specific answers to Campaign4Change’s questions on the Cerner implementation.

Comment

It was probably unfair of doctors at Athens Regional to judge the Cerner system so soon after go-live but their fierce reaction is a reminder that doctors exist to help patients, not spend time getting to grips with common-good IT systems.

Would an NHS CEO resign after a rebellion by UK doctors over a problematic EHR implementation? It’s highly unlikely – especially if trusts can stop news leaking out of the effects on patients. In the NHS that’s easy to do.

Athens Regional CEO resigns

A tragic outcome for Cerner Millennium implementation?

Athens Regional is addressing computer problems encountered by doctors

Athens Regional is addressing computer problems after patients put at risk

CEO forced out?

 

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Posted in BT, BT Health, Campaign4Change, Cerner, change management, CIO, consultants, cost reduction, Department of Health, e-health, excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, health records, IT-related failures, LPfIT, NHS, npfit, public sector, public services

Coroner criticises hospital’s new IT after boy’s death

Posted on 06/03/2014 | 3 comments

By Tony Collins

Avon coroner Maria Voisin said yesterday that a new booking system at the Royal United Bath was responsible for three year-old Samuel Starr not being seen and given timely treatment.

It’s rare for a coroner to criticise a hospital’s new IT in direct terms. It is also rare for evidence to emerge of a link between the introduction of new hospital IT and harm to a patient.

Since patient administration systems began to be installed as part of the National Programme for IT in 2005, the disruption arising from go-lives has led to thousands of patient appointments being delayed at a number of trusts. Usually  trusts contend that no patients have suffered serious harm as a result.

Yesterday at the coroners court near Bristol, the coroner Voisin said: “Due to the failure of the hospital outpatients booking system, there was a five-month delay in Samuel being seen and receiving treatment. Samuel’s heart was disadvantaged and he died following urgent surgery.”

Catherine Holley, Samuel’s mother, said her first warning of Cerner implementation problems came in June 2012, about three months before her son’s death, when the RUH cardiologist’s post clinic letter said:

“I apologised to the parents that I should have seen him in January of this year, but I am afraid a few patients have fallen foul of the Millennium changeover and I suspect this is the case here”.

The RUH installed the Cerner Millennium system at the end of July 2011. After the go-live the trust’s board reports, and a post-implementation review of the system by Pwc in February 2012, raised no serious concerns.

One of Pwc’s main criticisms of the system was the lack of clinical engagement – a common problem with NPfIT deployments.

Some excerpts from Pwc’s report:

“Given the issues and delays there is a still a good deal of uncertainty about whether the planned benefits can be realised. It is therefore important that there is a concerted effort to focus on driving out these benefits, early in 2012.”

“The go live itself did have some issues, but most of those interviewed felt that, relative to other Cerner Millennium implementations, it had gone well. Since the go-live the Trust has been working hard to address the issues, and to help users use the system more effectively…”

“There are a number of issues which arose during the audit which, although not directly covered within the audit objectives, are important in ensuring that the trust realises all the potential benefits from the Cerner Millennium implementation. These are as follows:

“There is a need for greater clinical engagement to ensure that clinicians are using the system in the most effective way – the Trust operates a Clinical Engagement Group which meets on a monthly basis.

“However feedback from a number of interviewees is that this meeting isn’t as productive as it might be and that the Trust needs to think of other ways to improve clinical engagement.”

Pwc said that the trust needed a clinical lead for Cerner Millennium who would focus on key clinical priorities and “sell” the benefits of Millennium to other clinicians. The trust also needed a CIO who would be responsible for IM&T, the Business Intelligence Unit, the Care Records Service team, Records Management, and managing the end of a [local service provider] contract with BT in 2015.

Pwc said the risks included:

  • The end of the contract with BT in 2015
  • Recent issues with BT delivery, with several significant outages of service
  • The issues with clinical engagement.

None of the trust reports – or Pwc’s review –  mentioned any adverse impact of the new system’s implementation on patients.

In 2011, several months after the go-live, the RUH’s “Insight” magazine quoted the Chief Executive James Scott as suggesting the go-live had been a success.

“Thanks to everyone for their hard work and patience during the switchover period,” Scott is quoted as saying. “It has been a major project for the RUH (and our partners BT and Cerner are describing it as the smoothest deployment yet), but we now have the foundation in place to meet the future needs of the Trust and the NHS.”

Care plan?

Catherine Holley expected Samuel to go onto a care plan after he had successful heart surgery at the age of nine months, in 2010. But it proved difficult to arrange an appointment for a scan on the new Cerner Millennium system installed at Royal United Hospital, Bath.

When the scan was eventually carried out Samuel’s heart had deteriorated and he died in September 2012 after an operation that was more complicated than expected.

This week’s three-day inquest at Flax Bourton Coroners Court heard that although Samuel’s medical records had been created on Millennium, no appointments were transferred across.

Speaking after the inquest, Samuel’s parents said they believe the system at Bath failed their son and that mistakes were made.

“It was devastating to hear evidence that an improperly implemented computer appointments system and a series of human errors resulted in the death of our son,”said Paul Starr’s Samuel’s father.

“We accept that mistakes happen but we believe that leaving a child unmonitored for as long as Samuel was, with so many opportunities to attend to him, goes beyond a simple error.

“Our three year old son had a complex cardiac condition and had been scheduled for regular cardiac reviews. In fact he was not properly assessed or nearly 21 months because of further delays.”

A Freedom of Information request revealed that there were 63 missed paediatric cardiac appointments as a result of problems arising from the Cerner implementation – some of which took nearly two years to discover.

Comment

It’s unlikely to have been the Cerner system itself at fault but an  implementation that involved several organisations including the Southern Programme for IT, a branch of the dismantled National Programme for IT.  As such nobody is likely to held responsible for what the coroner called a “failure” of the IT system.

Then again blaming an individual would be pointless.  Learning lessons – the right ones, and not just technical ones – is the objective. It may make a world of difference if those in charge of major go-lives in hospitals acknowledged that delayed appointments, or difficulties arranging them, and a disrupted administration, can harm patients – or worse.

IT in the NHS is seen as an integral part of hospital care when the technology, clinicians, nurses, administrators and other users are working in alignment. But when the IT is not working well, it is seen as something techie which has little or nothing to do with patient care and treatment.

Samuel Starr’s inquest draws attention to the fact that the difference between a good and bad IT implementation in a large hospital can be the difference between life and death.

But hospital deployments of patient administration systems have been going wrong with remarkable regularity for many years.  Isn’t it time to learn the right lessons?   

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Posted in BT, BT Health, Campaign4Change, Cerner, NHS, npfit, operational issues, outsourcing, project management, public sector, public services, PWC, SPfIT

Hospital group wins $106m settlement in Cerner dispute

Posted on 19/02/2014 | 1 comment

By Tony Collins

 A US health organisation Trinity Medical Centre has won a $106m settlement in  a legal dispute with Cerner, which is one the main suppliers of patient record systems to NHS trusts in London and the south.

Under the NPfIT BT has installed Cerner at trusts that include the Royal Free, London, Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals NHS Trust, Weston Area Health NHS Trust, Barts Health NHS Trust, North Bristol NHS Trust and more recently at Croydon Health Services NHS Trust.

The Wall St Journal says a clinical patient accounting program Trinity bought from Cerner in 2008 was defective and didn’t deliver the promised benefits, which Cerner disputed. Trinity sought about $240m in damages; Cerner estimated $4m.

The companies agreed to submit the dispute to arbitration which began in October 2013.

Cerner said it “strongly disagrees” with the award and believes the claim was based on unique circumstances. It called the award the only material judgment against Cerner in its 34-year history.

US lawyer Michael Dagley says his firm won a $106m settlement for North Dakota-based Trinity Medical Centre in an arbitration case against Cerner.

The firm says that Trinity alleged in 2012 that patient accounting software and other services purchased from Cerner were defective, producing thousands of billing errors.

“We think it’s tremendously significant because it represents the first major victory that we’re aware of by a health care provider against a software vendor,” Dagley said in a statement.

“Providers are under pressure to automate and vendors are under pressure to offer integrated products. Providers want one vendor for all their IT needs, so the vendors have this incentive to deliver software to the market as quickly as possible, and that can lead to products being introduced that are immature and defective, which in health care, can cause tremendous damage.”

Last year Cerner said it believed the chance of a material loss related to the matter was remote and it had 147 hospitals and 735 clinics using the patient accounting program.

Despite the settlement Cerner’s share price has held up well.

Trinity Medical Centre is a non-profit organisation with about 2,700 employees.

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Posted in BT, BT Health, Campaign4Change, Cerner, e-health, health, health records, IT projects, legal disputes, NHS, npfit, operational issues

Top 5 posts on this site in last 12 months

Posted on 02/01/2014 | 1 comment

Below are the top 5 most viewed posts of 2013.  Of other posts the most viewed includes “What exactly is HMRC paying Capgemini billions for?” and “Somerset County Council settles IBM dispute – who wins?“.

1) Big IT suppliers and their Whitehall “hostages”

Mark Thompson is a senior lecturer in information systems at Cambridge Judge Business School, ICT futures advisor to the Cabinet Office and strategy director at consultancy Methods.

Last month he said in a Guardian comment that central government departments are “increasingly being held hostage by a handful of huge, often overseas, suppliers of customised all-or-nothing IT systems”.

Some senior officials are happy to be held captive.

“Unfortunately, hostage and hostage taker have become closely aligned in Stockholm-syndrome fashion.

“Many people in the public sector now design, procure, manage and evaluate these IT systems and ignore the exploitative nature of the relationship,” said Thompson.

The Stockholm syndrome is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages bond with their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them.

This month the Foreign and Commonwealth Office issued  a pre-tender notice for Oracle ERP systems. Worth between £250m and £750m, the framework will be open to all central government departments, arms length bodies and agencies and will replace the current “Prism” contract with Capgemini.

It’s an old-style centralised framework that, says Chris Chant, former Executive Director at the Cabinet Office who was its head of G-Cloud, will have Oracle popping champagne corks.

2) Natwest/RBS – what went wrong?

Outsourcing to India and losing IBM mainframe skills in the process? The failure of CA-7 batch scheduling software which had a knock-on effect on multiple feeder systems?

As RBS continues to try and clear the backlog from last week’s crash during a software upgrade, many in the IT industry are asking how it could have happened.

3) Another Universal Credit leader stands down

Universal Credit’s Programme Director, Hilary Reynolds, has stood down after only four months in post. The Department for Work and Pensions says she has been replaced by the interim head of Universal Credit David Pitchford.

Last month the DWP said Pitchford was temporarily leading Universal Credit following the death of Philip Langsdale at Christmas. In November 2012 the DWP confirmed that the then Programme Director for UC, Malcolm Whitehouse, was stepping down – to be replaced by Hilary Reynolds. Steve Dover,  the DWP’s Corporate Director, Universal Credit Programme Business, has also been replaced.

4) The “best implementation of Cerner Millennium yet”?

Edward Donald, the chief executive of Reading-based Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, is reported in the trust’s latest published board papers as saying that a Cerner go-live has been relatively successful.

“The Chief Executive emphasised that, despite these challenges, the ‘go-live’ at the Trust had been more successful than in other Cerner Millennium sites.”

A similar, stronger message appeared was in a separate board paper which was released under FOI.  Royal Berkshire’s EPR [electronic patient record] Executive Governance Committee minutes said:

“… the Committee noted that the Trust’s launch had been considered to be the best implementation of Cerner Millennium yet and that despite staff misgivings, the project was progressing well. This positive message should also be disseminated…”

Royal Berkshire went live in June 2012 with an implementation of Cerner outside the NPfIT.  In mid-2009, the trust signed with University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre to deliver Millennium.

Not everything has gone well – which raises questions, if this was the best Cerner implementation yet,  of what others were like.

5) Universal Credit – the ace up Duncan Smith’s sleeve?

Some people, including those in the know, suspect  Universal Credit will be a failed IT-based project, among them Francis Maude. As Cabinet Office minister Maude is ultimately responsible for the Major Projects Authority which has the job, among other things, of averting major project failures.

But Iain Duncan Smith, the DWP secretary of state, has an ace up his sleeve: the initial go-live of Universal Credit is so limited in scope that claims could be managed by hand, at least in part.

The DWP’s FAQs suggest that Universal Credit will handle, in its first phase due to start in October 2013, only new claims  – and only those from the unemployed.  Under such a light load the system is unlikely to fail, as any particularly complicated claims could managed clerically.

 

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Posted in Accenture, Agile, BT, Campaign4Change, Capgemini, Cerner, Cloud, Cloud Computing, CSC, DWP, excessive secrecy, FOI, Freedom of Information, G-Cloud, Government IT, health records, HP, IBM, IT projects, IT-related failures, legal disputes, local democracy, local government, LPfIT, Major Projects Authority, NHS, npfit, outsourcing, public-private partnerships, Real-Time Information, SAP, Universal Credit

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Croydon trust plans “high-risk” Cerner go-live in secret

Posted on 26/09/2013 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

NHS trusts have gone live with Cerner Millennium with mixed success. Eight trust implementations went seriously awry. A list is at the end of this post.

The flawed go-lives have meant that hospital managers have lost track, cumulatively, of thousands of patients and found that treatments,  including those for cancer, were delayed or care pathways interrupted. At times medical notes have not been available, or clinicians have been given the wrong notes.

In July 2008 E-Health Insider reported that the deployment of a national programme care records system at Milton Keynes Hospital NHS Foundation Trust “developed into an untenable situation which resulted in near melt down of the organisation”.

One of the lessons from the problematic go-lives is that trusts, when they have reported on the difficulties later, have said they underestimated the risks.

In particular they regarded the patient records system as mainly administrative with no risks to the health and care of patients.  Yet it is possible for incidents arising from flawed patient record implementations to be judged “clinical”.

Is Croydon Health Services NHS Trust, which includes the former Mayday hospital, about to repeat this same mistake – of regarding the risks as non-clinical?

The Trust is due to go live this weekend with the start of one of the largest patient record go-lives in the UK.  The deployment is being run under the NPfIT, which, in the capital, is now called the London Programme for IT. The plans are to install Millennium at Croydon University Hospital (formerly Mayday) and at some community sites.

The Trust says its preparations are designed to ensure a safe and effective deployment that will replace systems that are more than 20 years old and lack “many of the functions one expects in the modern healthcare digital age”.

But the signs are, from the trust’s board papers, that the risks of a flawed implementation are being seen largely as financial and administrative. For patients it appears that the worst that is envisaged is a “poor experience”.  

Have the risks to patients been properly flagged to the board’s directors?

I looked through Croydon’s most recently published board papers to see how well the trust’s directors have been kept informed of the risks of the go-live and could see almost no mention of Cerner – except a risk that income to the Trust could be affected if it is unable to produce timely reports. There is no specific mention of risks to patients.

Given the history of failed implementations of Cerner Millennium under the NPfIT, I asked  Croydon Health NHS Trust what directors have been told about the risks.

This was the trust’s reply:

“CRS Millennium has featured regularly on the Corporate Risk Register presented to each Part 1 Board meeting.

“In addition, implementation has received detailed confidential consideration at Part 2 of Board meetings, (which is why you won’t find it in our public board papers).”

I then put it to the trust that I was not sure why, in a new era of openness and transparency in the NHS,  that board discussions should be in private on a matter that could affect large numbers of patients to judge from past implementations at other trusts. The spokesperson – the interim stakeholder relations manager – made no further comment.

Richard Granger,  when head of the NPfIT, was quoted as saying he was ashamed of some of the Cerner deployments . Granger quit the programme in January 2008 – and since then several more Cerner deployments at trusts have gone badly wrong, at North Bristol NHS Trust, for example.

After the NPfIT go-live of Cerner at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, the National Audit Office, at the request of a member of the Public Accounts Committee Conservative MP Richard Bacon, investigated and produced a public report on the lessons learned.

The Nuffield go-live was in December 2005. Since then managers at all trusts that have gone live with Cerner have claimed they have learned those lessons.

Comment:

It’s true that Croydon Trust’s risk register has shown “red” for the Cerner implementation. It is indeed deemed “high risk”. But how many of its board directors will understand the nature and substance of the risks to patients from a graphic?

It’s easy for the trust to say that board directors have been informed through confidential discussions but how would anyone outside the trust be able to judge whether that’s true?

Trust boards can never be held fully accountable after a patient record go-live goes wrong. They hold their own investigations or sometimes commission inquiries by consultants known to them, and the final reports usually indicate that no patients have been harmed.  Even after a trust has lost track of thousands of patient appointments for more than a year, it has later reported that in the end all was well.

As trust boards are not voted in and out by the public they have a special duty to ensure they are fully informed on things that can go wrong. Is Croydon Health’s board fully informed on the risks of the Cerner go-live? I doubt it.  

Some flawed NHS patient record go-lives:

Barts and The London

Royal Free Hampstead

Weston Area Health Trust

Milton Keynes Hospital NHS Trust

Worthing and Southlands

Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals NHS Trust

Nuffield Orthopaedic

North Bristol.

St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust

Lorenzo:

University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust

Birmingham Women’s Foundation Trust

NHS Bury

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Posted in Campaign4Change, Cerner, change management, excessive secrecy, health, health records, LPfIT, npfit, openness and transparency

Trust spends £16.6m on consultants for Cerner EPR

Posted on 01/08/2013 | 2 comments

By Tony Collins

Reading-based Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust says in an FOI response that its spending on “computer consultants since the inception of the EPR system is £16.6m”.

The Trust’s total spend on the Cerner Millennium system was said to have been £30m by October 2012.

NHS IT suppliers have told me that the typical cost of a Trust-wide EPR [electronic patient record] system, including support for five years, is about £6m-£8m, which suggests that the Royal Berkshire has spent £22m more than necessary on new patient record IT.

Jonathan Isaby, Taxpayers’ Alliance political director, said: “This is an astonishing amount of taxpayers’ money to have squandered on a system which is evidently failing to deliver results.

“Every pound lost to this project is a pound less available for frontline medical care. Those who were responsible for the failure must be held to account for their actions as this kind of waste cannot go unchecked.”

 The £16.6m consultancy figure was uncovered this week through a Freedom of Information request made by The Reading Chronicle. It had asked for the spend on consultants working on the Cerner Millennium EPR [which went live later than expected in June 2012].

The Trust replied: “Further to your request for information the costs spent on computer consultants since the inception of the EPR system is £16.6m.”

The Chronicle says that the system is “meant to retrieve patient details in seconds, linking them to the availability of surgeons, beds or therapies, but has forced staff to spend up to 15 minutes navigating through multiple screens to book one routine appointment, leading to backlogs on wards and outpatient clinics”.

Royal Berkshire’s chief executive Edward Donald had said the Cerner Millennium go live was successful.  A trust board paper said:

 “The Chief Executive emphasised that, despite these challenges, the ‘go-live’ at the Trust had been more successful than in other Cerner Millennium sites.”

A similar, stronger message had appeared was in a separate board paper which was released under FOI.  Royal Berkshire’s EPR [electronic patient record] Executive Governance Committee minutes said:

“… the Committee noted that the Trust’s launch had been considered to be the best implementation of Cerner Millennium yet and that despite staff misgivings, the project was progressing well. This positive message should also be disseminated…”

Comment

Royal Berkshire went outside the NPfIT. But its costs are even higher than the breathtakingly high costs to the taxpayer of NPfIT Cerner and Lorenzo implementations.

As senior officials at the Department of Health have been so careless with public funds over NHS IT – and have spent millions on the same sets of consultants – they are in no position to admonish Royal Berkshire.

So who can criticise Royal Berkshire and should its chief executive be held accountable?

When it’s official policy to spend tens of millions on EPRs that may or may not make things better for hospitals and patients – and could make things much worse – how can accountability play any part in the purchase of the systems and consultants?

The enormously costly Cerner and Lorenzo EPR implementations go on – in an NHS IT world that is largely without credible supervision, control, accountability or regulation.

Cash squandered on IT help

Trust loses £18m on IT system

The best implementation of Cerner Millennium yet?

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Posted in BT Health, Cerner, consultants, CSC, culture, e-health, Freedom of Information, health records, IT-related failures, NHS, npfit, oversight, Politics, procurement, public sector, public services, software quality, supplier relationships

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