Cambridge to pick EPR supplier in April

Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust are expected to announce the winner of their high profile electronic patient record procurement in mid-April.

The trusts announced an all-US shortlist of suppliers for the key plank of their eHospital project in December.

They are now expected to make a decision on the shortlist by 22 April, in a move that could also indicate how likely new US entrants are to break into the UK market as the National Programme for IT in the NHS winds down.

The shortlist is Allscripts, Cerner and Epic, which were selected from an original 53 responses to the joint procurement, which is being driven primarily by Cambridge University Hospitals.

The large number of responses reflected the nature of the tender, which was split into two lots – for infrastructure and hardware and for software.

The remaining companies for the first lot (hardware and infrastructure) are: Accenture, McKesson and System C bidding as a consortium; BT; and Hewlett Packard.

US software supplier Epic is well regarded in the US, but it has no UK reference sites. However, Epic is known to have heavily invested in the Cambridge procurement and is thought to be well regarded by senior clinicians at the trust.

Allscripts is another major US supplier and Cerner’s inclusion was expected given its involvement with the national programme and wins at big trusts that have gone outside it.

The plan is for a new EPR system and associated infrastructure to be implemented in time for Papworth to move onto the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in 2015.

Both trusts currently run legacy iSoft patient administration systems, with Papworth taking iPM as an ‘interim’ system from NPfIT, while Cambridge stuck with its existing system.

The trusts also issued a tender last week for project management and IT consultancy services for their eHospital programme.

According to the notice in the Official Journal of the European Union, the trusts are looking to supplement their own clinical and non-clinical staff with up to ten external individuals, who will be seconded to the eHospital project for between six months and two years.

The external team is expected to include two programme directors, a technical architect, a design authority team leader, an applications team leader, a programme office manager and two benefits and business change leads.

The deadline for project management and consultancy tenders is 10 April.