Airedale takes SystmOne EPR

Airedale NHS Foundation Trust is deploying the full suite of TPP’s acute systems with the patient administration system, A&E and bed management modules due to be implemented this year.

The new arrangement will allow the health record of more than 200,000 patients in the region to be shared between all clinicians using SystmOne.

TPP and Accenture have signed a three-year agreement with Airedale to implement a full hospital system based on SystmOne technology.

The trust told eHealth Insider the contract did not go out to OJEU because the total value was under the threshold, which is £113,000 for supplies or services.

By the end of 2012, Airedale will have TPP’s PAS, the emergency department management module, and the first phase of hospital bed management, which will be in the medical admissions unit.

The bed management system is then due to be extended across the whole hospital and the remaining modules of e-prescribing and e-discharge will be deployed throughout 2013.

There are currently around 1.1m electronic records held in the trust’s systems that will be transferred to SystmOne.

TPP’s system is already used by about 80 general practitioners, 10 palliative care organisations and more than 100 community services in the Bradford and Airedale region.

Tim Rycroft, head of IT and information governance at Airedale said the trust is currently heavily paper based and this deal is a step on its journey towards an electronic patient record.

“SystmOne offers us the potential to join up patient care across primary, secondary and social care, creating ‘one patient, one record’," he said.

“This means that clinicians in any care setting will have access to appropriate information about a patient. With SystmOne, we will get closer to our vision of a shared electronic patient record across all our services.”

If a patient attends the hospital, they can be asked for their consent to hospital staff seeing their primary care electronic record.

In emergency situations, patient consent can be overridden, but this is monitored by an audit trail.

A hospital visit will also spark an automatic entry in the patient’s primary care record and a GP will be able to see the administrative details of the admission.

Clinical details will be sent to the GP in electronic discharge letters from both A&E and hospital wards.

SystmOne works with just one electronic record and what is visible or hidden within the record is governed by the sharing model and patient consent.

Rycroft said the trust started looking at the future of its PAS around September last year and was approached by TPP in January.

“TPP came to see us in January this year to discuss the detail of the offer and we actively started working with them around May,” he explained.

The PAS is due to go live in late November.

“It does seem all quite quick, obviously we have not been very vocal about it because we were still working through the contract situation with TPP and Accenture.

“It’s in some respects new territory for TPP even though they have a huge amount of experience in primary care, but the work we have been doing with them so far has been exceptionally good, they are very responsive and delivery partner Accenture have been very helpful and positive towards the work we are doing.”

TPP clinical director John Parry said that as a GP working in the area for more than 20 years, he “couldn’t be more delighted with this news.”

“Not only will clinicians at Airedale benefit from truly integrated functionality which will increase efficiency and improve patient care, but patients across the entire region will now potentially be able to share their electronic patient record with every service that cares for them,” he said.

“It’s a fantastic step forward for all of us as clinicians in Bradford and Airedale and even better news for patients in the area.”

The Airedale contract is the first instance of an acute trust taking the full suite of TPP’s secondary care systems, though some modules are already in use in trusts around England.