Cerner Causes "A right Royal mess"

Newly released reports on [the United Kingdom's] Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust’s implementation of Cerner Millennium show that many crucial issues were not addressed prior to go-live; and that the trust is continuing to face considerable operational and financial issues because of the system.

Eight months on from its go-live with Cerner Millennium, Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust is still struggling to reach a “full business as usual model.” The trust continues to experience problems with appointment booking and reporting and expects to spend a further £6.2m this year on implementing the system; against a budget of £2.5m.

The situation is a far cry from what the trust hoped to achieve when it quit the National Programme for IT in the NHS in 2008. In mid-2009, it signed with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre, which had done a deal to implement Millennium across Newcastle, to implement the US system in Reading.

The plan was to get theelectronic patient recordsystem live between July and September 2011. But the trust did not go-live until June last year, more than 1,000 days after project start-up. By this time, UMPC was nowhere in sight, and there were reports that the project had been dogged by problems with poor project management and an over-reliance on contractors...