Cerner deployed at London’s new temporary hospital

LONDON, UK – Last week, the government of the United Kingdom announced the 100-acre convention centre ExCel London would be turned into a 4,000-bed temporary hospital to aid the city’s response to the pandemic – the Nightingale Hospital. As part of the plan, Cerner will be providing the electronic health records (EHR) platform that will help healthcare professionals access and record relevant information for COVID-19 patients.

The technology will be used as an extension of the Cerner Millennium system already in place at Barts Health NHS Trust – the largest NHS trust in England and one of Britain’s leading healthcare providers.

Sharing Barts Health’s EHR means that the staff working at the Nightingale Hospital will use most of the technology and processes already successfully implemented across the Trust’s five hospitals. It also means that any staff from Barts Health providing care in the temporary hospital will already have access to the system, which will reduce the need for additional training.

Barts Health’s EHR is already connected with the network of pathology services providers in East London. Along with those working in Barts’ permanent hospital sites, staff at the Nightingale Hospital will be able to request tests and access results rapidly and electronically – helping to drive quicker discharge of recovered patients and maximise hospital capacity.

Furthermore, London-wide connectivity, enabled by Cerner’s Health Information Exchange (HIE), is also already established between Barts Health and the local primary and community care providers. This allows seamless sharing of patient information locally, and then across London’s other acute Trusts via the OneLondon Local Health and Care Record Exemplar (LHCRE).

Improved connectivity will give clinicians at the Nightingale Hospital real-time access to information about a patient’s health and care journey that could turn out to be paramount for their treatment, regardless of where they have been transferred from – helping to improve care coordination and efficiency.

Working closely together, NHS and Cerner teams have managed to get this new facility created within the system in just a matter of days.