Our electronic patient record: information for referrers
On Friday 18 August, we’re due to go live with our new Cerner electronic patient record, or EPR.
We expect our EPR to improve the quality of our patient information and the speed with which we can access it to provide high-quality care.
It should also significantly improve the way in which we communicate and share information with our partners, including our colleagues in primary care, social care and community services.
It’s a major change for our services, and we ask our patients and partners to bear with us as our teams adjust to this new way of working.
Making referrals while we go live
We’re disconnecting our electronic referral system from our patient administration system from 8pm on Thursday 17 August as we prepare for our EPR go-live.
Normally your teams would see appointment slots and book your patients directly into a slot.
During our go-live period, your teams will not be able to see these slots as we have disconnected our electronic referrals system from PAS temporarily while we transfer all our data to our new EPR.
Instead, you must select the defer to provider option.
This will add your patients to our manual lists, and our teams will schedule them accordingly.
We expect this process to continue for most of the week commencing Monday 21 August, and will update you once our systems return to normal.
What’s happening
On Friday 18 August:
- Our emergency departments will move to our new EPR at 7am
- All other teams will work on paper during downtime as we transfer data into the new EPR.
On Monday 21 August, our EPR will come online and teams will start to use it as normal.
We will stagger the start of electronic prescribing across our wards over a two-week period. During this time, prescriptions will be managed either on paper or on the EPR, while we transfer all our wards to Cerner.
If you receive discharge notes, you’ll find that you receive a combination of hard copy and electronic pharmacy discharge information during this short transition period. Once all our wards have moved to electronic prescribing, however, all our discharge summaries will be fully electronic again.
Referrals and access during downtime
Our emergency departments, urgent treatment centres and same day emergency care units will be open for patients during our downtime period.
You can also continue to call our single point of access telephone service for advice.
You can refer or request advice and guidance as normal throughout downtime using Rego Care Navigator and the NHS Electronic Referral System.
After go-live
After go-live, you can continue to refer to our services exactly as you do now.
Our letters and correspondence to you and to our patients will change to be consistent with what you currently receive from Chelsea and Westminster or Imperial.
Test resutls after go-live
If you request a test for a patient on ICE, the lab or imaging results will appear on both ICE and our Cerner EPR.
Similarly, if our hospital teams request a test for a patient on our Cerner EPR, these results will also appear on both ICE and the EPR.
This means you will be able to see results for all tests, whether they were ordered in or out of hospital, as will our hospital clinicians.
Help and support for referrers
If you have any concerns or questions, you are welcome to contact us on lnwh-tr.primarycarequeries@nhs.net and our teams will do their best to help.
Please don’t send specific clinical enquiries to this email address as the team monitoring it won’t be able to help. Instead, if you need advice about a patient, please use our advice and guidance service or our single point of access telephone service as normal.