Go live and post go live

Once you have completed the on-boarding checklist and the stakeholder capability rollout form you are in a position to go-live.

Your planned go-live date should have been agreed with your system supplier, internal teams and NHSX implementation team as part of your planning activities and progress provided to all parties throughout the process.  You should now proceed to submitting your forms to the NRLNEMS team 14 days before your implementation date. While you are waiting for the implementation to go ahead, you should consider the following activities.

Once a target go live has been confirmed you should update your external and internal stakeholders on progress, the implications of the go live and explain any action they may need to take as a result. 

Speak to your communications team for their advice on how best to inform staff and external stakeholders. We recommend informing staff about the project when a go-live date is established, and the relevant staff have been trained. This helps to cement the training that has been delivered and inform a wider audience about the importance of the change and why your organisation is supporting it.

You should also inform local service/helpdesks regarding imminent go live and provide them with the incident support model.

Have a go / no go call

When you have completed the steps above and think you are ready to go live, consider arranging a call with your supplier. This call is called a ‘go / no go’ call as it is held to ensure that the key actions have been completed and to confirm that you are ready to go live.

Once NHS Digital has assessed your on-boarding checklist and the NRL NEMS rollout form, they will confirm back to you that you can proceed. You should then work with your supplier to arrange the cutover activities to ensure no data is missed between your current ways of working and your NEMS implementation.

Make sure all staff in that setting know about your planned go-live date in advance and what that means. Make sure you have someone available or shadowing in that setting to help ensure the new processes are followed correctly and that staff are able to ask advice if they need to. 

The following aspects should be considered while running NEMS interoperability as a live service, that is, once your implementation project is complete and the service is operational. Once interoperability becomes ‘business as usual’ they should be included in your organisation’s Standard Operating Procedure with an owner for each of the following tasks.

Establish and maintain a local business owner / local governance for NEMs ensuring that there is a named person within your organisation for the service and that NHSX is kept up to date with their details (and where possible, a shared mailbox/back up email address) for ongoing communications, service updates and benefits tracking. 

Check levels of utilisation  by monitoring that patterns of usage are in line with expectations.

Follow routine data quality audits maintaining high standards of data quality and accuracy, for example, maintaining up to date contact details of your organisational lead with your partner organisations

Keep regular security and access audits checking that information is being routinely accessed by the correct people.

Share ​​​​​​ the learning and realise and capture benefits by managing business change and capturing benefits will ensure that interoperability is being used to best advantage. This good practice should be shared with local colleagues and nationally with NHSX. You may want to ask the following questions. 

• how does interoperability affect your working practices and what is its impact on outcomes for patients? Share with colleagues
• what lessons have you learned that might assist others with implementing and/or using the service? Share with partner Trusts and local authorities
• opportunities to improve the service in future. Share with NHSX
• what improvements are you seeing? Measurable or qualitative? How are you maximising these?

You should consider having local checkpoint calls between your implementation team members to ensure everything is running as expected.  You may wish to include your supplier in the early calls in case there are queries with regard to how your system is working.

Once you are satisfied interoperability is working as expected, you should close the project down and collate any lessons learned.  Please feed any implementation hints and tips to the NHSX implementation team so they update this guide to support other organisations in the future.