The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust provides specialist cancer treatment, in collaboration with the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), based from their hospital sites in Chelsea and Sutton. In 1851, the Trust opened as the world’s first hospital dedicated to cancer diagnosis, treatment, research and education, and is ranked globally as being in the top five cancer centres in the world, treating over 59,000 NHS and private patients annually.
In March 2019, the Trust’s procurement for a replacement Radiology Information System (RIS) came to an end when they awarded the project to Soliton IT for their class-leading Radiology+ RIS application, which was to be rolled out across both sites in order to manage clinical workflows within the Radiology departments.
During the following year, the Project Teams (and the healthcare industry as a whole) faced a major challenge which had potential to impact the project delivery – which was due to start imminently. The implementation of Trust COVID19 protocols, and subsequent recovery phases, resulted in a Go-Live date later than originally planned; the prolonged deployment prompted both additional tasks and overall importance on maintaining momentum in delivery.
The Soliton IT Project Management team was only too willing to step up to the task; demonstrating exceptional implementation skills during a demanding time. One such example, Project Go-Live, had to adhere to strict social distancing guidelines – the Soliton IT Project Team were assigned an on-site base to administer triaging and resolution of issues during a period which would have ordinarily been significantly engaged and “hands-on” with the Trust. In addition to the complex data migration, which exceeded several million records, there was highly detailed development required for the HL7 interface to the “home-grown” EPR in order to support their data requirements in the Trust data warehouse. Context links to this EPR and Hermes Nuclear Medicine reporting platforms also called for bespoke configuration by the Soliton IT Development and Application Specialist teams. In addition, specific development was required for mammography double-read workflows, which included side-by-side report comparison and structured grading in the clinical reports.
On 20 July 2020, Soliton IT announced the successful Go-Live of Radiology+ into the Royal Marsden NHS Trust, overcoming the challenges of deploying a clinical system during a global pandemic. Maggie Buckley, Programme Manager, comments:
“The performance of the Project Team and engagement from the Trust has been exceptional. We already knew that we were facing obstacles during a very busy period for Go-Lives, and the additional sanctions of social distancing and unprecedented clinical workloads brought unique difficulties. The Soliton IT team had to quickly adapt their usual methodology to ensure the project was implemented to high standard, whilst considering the Trust’s new social distancing requirements and amplified levels of meticulousness.”
