Yeovil gets £3.7m to implement EPR

Yeovil District Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has received £3.7m in government funding to implement InterSystems’ electronic patient record system.

TrakCare will be rolled out across the trust over the next two years.

EPR programme manager Carole Shuff could not reveal the value of the eight-year contract with InterSystems, but confirmed that the trust received £3.7m in central funding for the project.

This has allowed it to move forward faster with its plans for an intergrated EPR.

Yeovil worked with Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust to procure a new system. The group, known as SmartCare, announced last May it had chosen InterSystems as its supplier.

It is one of six collaborations of southern trusts that received little or nothing from the National Programme for IT and have together attracted £80 million in central funding for implementing new technologies.

Yeovil uses a number of legacy HP systems and will start by replacing the patient administration system, maternity and A&E systems.

“We have been running workshops to get familiar with the product and understand what the opportunities are to improve our ways of working. We are also starting data migration and moving towards testing and training in the months to come,” said Shuff.

Clinical lead for nursing Becky Garnett said staff  have become more accustomed to using technology following the introduction of VitalPac’s electronic observations system, with money from the Safer Hospitals Safer Wards Technology Fund.

“A big reason why we bid is we recognised it was a step on the journey towards clinical staff using IT to help improve the way we deliver patient care,” she explained.

Nurses as well as doctors, pharmacists, physiotherapists and specialists use the observations system on mobile devices. The trust has a ‘bring your own device’ policy and has distributed 400-500 iPads to staff.

Tony Smith, Yeovil's medical lead for IT, said the need to log into separate modules was a big barrier for clinicians and therefore the trust decided to take the single system approach to EPR, which also brings the benefit of a layer of clinical decision support.

He said the project is clinically led and the main driver is to improve patient safety, particularly in the area of electronic prescribing.

Yeovil is one of 29 vanguard areas of England funded to trial new models of integrated care. A trust spokesman said the introduction of TrakCare will help it break down organisational boundaries and enable better communication both within and outside of the trust.