On 16 November 2018, a sea of brightly-coloured t-shirts set the scene for go-live day at Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust (RFL) as they prepared to launch their Cerner Millennium® electronic health record (EHR) across their three hospital sites – Chase Farm, Barnet, and the Royal Free Hospital. It was a remarkable landmark for the Trust, having only started the implementation process in January that same year.
“Anyone who has implemented an EHR before will know it usually takes longer than 11 months,” noted Katie Trott, chief nursing information officer for the Trust, during her presentation at this year’s European Collaboration Forum. She went on to explain the RFL’s innovative approach for a faster and more streamlined implementation process: “In our case, time was of essence, and instead of reinventing the wheel, we decided to undertake this project using Cerner’s Model Experience, which made it possible for us to achieve this – successfully – in just that time.”
Chase Farm Hospital (CFH), built to be paperless from the ground up, was designed without a medical records department, and once it opened in September 2018, it became the most digitally advanced hospital in the NHS.
Chase Farm at the forefront of digital maturity
On 7 June 2019, only seven months after the completion of this rollout, CFH has received one of the industry’s most recognised accolades for this achievement: after successfully completing HIMSS Analytics’ Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM) assessment, the hospital became the third organisation in the UK to join HIMSS Europe EMRAM Stage 6 community.
Cerner are excited to be working with forward-thinking, digitally enabled organisations like RFL, and proud to have played a part in their journey to HIMSS Stage 6. Congratulations to all the teams across RFL who were involved in gaining this plaudit.
“We are tremendously proud to call RFL our partners in this journey to improve the way health and care are delivered across the country. Their EMRAM Stage 6 attainment is just further proof of their strong commitment to leverage technology to transform staff’s and patients’ experience, and deliver better outcomes. We’re privileged to be supporting them along that process,” said Distie Profit, general manager for Cerner UK, as she praised the good news.
Dr Chris Streather, RFL group chief medical officer, said:
“We are delighted that Chase Farm is one of the few NHS hospitals to have achieved a Stage 6 rating - especially as we have been validated against the tougher criteria that have recently been introduced.
“This is testament to the incredible vision and dedication of our staff who have embraced a new way of working, enabling us to deliver outstanding care to our patients. This digital approach is what the future of healthcare looks like and means a better experience for our patients and our staff. Now our aim is to further advance our use of technology so CFH can become a Stage 7 hospital.”
Notes for editors
About Cerner
At Cerner, we believe in building positive, long-term partnerships that drive value across the health and care landscape. Our intelligent platforms and services connect people, information and care at 28,000+ facilities of all sizes worldwide and help manage the health of 218 million citizens across the globe. Together with clients and industry partners, we’re innovating for the future, integrating entire health and care systems to enable them to deliver smarter, value-based care, better outcomes, and proactively manage and improve the wellbeing of their populations.
In the UK, our powerful, open and interoperable Cerner Millennium EHR platform is utilised by 122,000+ health and care professionals across 22 NHS Trusts, our Health Information Exchange (HIE) is connecting over eight million health records, while our population health intelligence platform, HealtheIntent®, is contracted to help clients proactively manage and improve the health of 9.5 million UK citizens.
About the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust
The Royal Free London’s mission is to provide world-class expertise and local care.
We attract patients from across the country and beyond to our specialist services in liver and kidney transplantation, haemophilia, HIV, infectious diseases, plastic surgery, immunology, neurology, Parkinson’s disease, vascular surgery, cardiology, amyloidosis and scleroderma. We are a member of the academic health science partnership UCL Partners, which brings people and organisations together to transform the health and wellbeing of the population.
The Royal Free London is one of four Trusts across the NHS to be chosen to develop a group model, enabling us to share services and resources more effectively across hospitals to improve the experience of patients and staff. More information is available here.
Barnet Hospital, Chase Farm Hospital and the Royal Free Hospital are part of the Royal Free London group, and North Middlesex University Hospital NHS Trust became its first clinical partner in September 2017.
