Engagement Period February 2017 – December 2019

The Challenge

In 2016 Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (ChelWest) initiated a programme to replace the legacy EPR applications in use at the Trust’s two sites:

Chelsea and Westminster Hospital (CWH) and West Middlesex University Hospital (WMUH).

The applications in use at the two sites were principally but not exclusively LastWord from IDX and CaMIS from EMIS Health(WMUH).

Cloud21 were asked to assist with a complex project to merge the data from WMUH and CWH into the Imperial College Hospital Trust (ICHT) instance of Cerner Millennium.

The scope was for all future activity and 18 months’ historic activity to be migrated.

The Project was split in two migration phases. Phase one saw WMUH migrating in the ICHT domain as a new Trust. Phase two then merged CWH into the ICHT domain and into the configuration deployed in Phase one.

All 3 sites worked with Cloud21 to agree an overarching data migration strategy, taking account of the need to share configuration, numbering and a single merged Master Patient Index. The IDS: View module was commissioned from Cloud21 to achieve this requirement.

The Approach

The Cloud21 team used the IDS data migration module to map existing data sources to the data migration scope. Bespoke CCL queries were generated to directly pull key data from Millennium where items were required for migration but not available through the standard daily extracts. Cloud21 provided a high level of support to the Cerner system build process and emulated many of the Cerner pre-load validation checks within the IDS to validate migrated data ahead of each trial load.

A key feature of this project was to identify and merge patients with records in all 3 systems into a single record within the ICHT instance. Cloud21 used an updated IDS Patient Merge module to agree with the Trust the criteria for automatically merging patients and allowed the Trust to review patients flagged as potential.

merges and flag those that they wanted to automatically merge. As part of the merging of the two ChelWest sites the IDS tool kit was able to assign the correct medical record number to ensure the primary number was available in Millennium against the correct patient activity. Cloud21 also assisted with the downstream messaging renumbering by providing a merged MRN mapping file.

Cloud21 worked closely with the Trust’s data quality team to develop logic within the IDS:

DM Module to correct data quality issues and ensure that the IFF generated during the transformation process met with the IFF specification from Cerner. Where unreported DQ issues were identified as being present in the source system, additional DQ logic was added to the source system import routines to correct or the issues were reported back to the DQ team for manual correction pre migration. Custom cutover reports were created to address any DQ issues that could not be correct as part of the final transformation.

Cloud21 provided additional weekly reporting during the trial load process, focussing on the live Referral to Treatment Patient tracking list (RTT PTL), to ensure that post migration both Trusts’ live RTT PTL’s were accurate or that any deviation was understood by the business.

How did our work deliver value to the Client?

The team successfully implemented a complex data migration programme within tight timescales without any project delays. The delivery of the project was aided by Cloud21’s extensive understanding of the processes leading to data migration, extensive knowledge of both source and target systems, the generation of IFFs, and their analysis and resolution of issues that arose during migration.

Testimonial

“Working with Cloud21 on this project has been a very good experience. Great at explaining technically complex issues in a simple way to enable operational and clinical teams to take whatever action was required. All main deliverables were met, and all steps in the process were on schedule. A great company to work with, the service cannot be faulted in any way.”