Referrers

Our new Cerner Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system goes live this week.

We expect Cerner 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, so we ask our patients and partners to bear with us as our teams adjust to this new way of working.

The official launch date is Friday 3 November.

Making referrals while we go live

We’re disconnecting our electronic referral system - NHS eReferral Service - from our patient administration system as we prepare for our EPR go-live on Friday, 3 November 2023. 

Normally your teams would see appointment slots on NHS eReferral service (eRS) for certain services, 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 referral 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’ referral to our manual lists, and our teams will schedule them accordingly.

For the services that follow an assessment pathway, please continue to submit the referrals via eRS. 

We expect this process to continue for at least two weeks from Friday 3 November and will update you once our systems return to normal.

What’s happening?

Our emergency departments will move to our new EPR at 8am on Friday 3 November. All other teams will work on paper during downtime as we transfer data into the new EPR.

On Monday 6 November, 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 the Trust.

Test results 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 thh-tr.bookingcentre@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.