Specialist hospitals to procure EHRs

Two specialist UK hospitals are looking to procure electronic patient record systems and have invited feedback from potential suppliers.

Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust – the UK's largest specialist cardiothoracic hospital – is planning to tender for an electronic patient record worth up to £20 million, having decided against the Epic EPR in the middle of last year.

Meanwhile, Great Ormond St Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust – the country’s largest paediatric centre for many specialities – is looking for an EPR and clinical/business research platform. 

Both plan to sign ten-year contracts with suppliers.

Papworth issued a notice inviting expressions of interest from suppliers via a pre-qualification questionnaire in late November and applications closed this week. The contract will be worth £10 million – £20 million.

The notice says Papworth is looking for: “An electronic patient record and patient administration system with full intra- and inter-organisational interoperability”. It wants a fully hosted system along with deployment, support and maintenance and expects to invite five suppliers to participate in the procurement process.

Papworth had intended to deploy the Epic EPR after a joint procurement process with Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in 2012.

Cambridge went live with the system in October 2014, as part of a bigger eHospital programme, but Digital Health News reported in August last year that Papworth had decided not to go ahead with the purchase. Board members felt it did not provide the best value for money for the trust.

Cambridge has since been put into special measures by Monitor, which said the eHospital programme had caused "significant cost increases", while benefits had not been realised.

Great Ormond Sreet Hospital’s procurement will be divided into lots: Lot 1 will be for the EPR system, while Lot 2 is for a clinical/ business intelligence and research platform.

A briefing document says that for Lot 1, the trust is looking for a PAS, e-prescribing, order communications, clinical decision support and a “child friendly, age-appropriate patient and family portal”, among other things.

In Lot 2 it is looking for clinical and business intelligence tools, scientific administrative tools, an analytics platform and support for translational research.

The document says the trust’s staff are frustrated by the current IT systems, which are “complex and often difficult to use” with information not readily transferred between systems and paper still a large part of the process. 

“We also know that there are real issues for patient safety with multiple ways both electronic and manual to prescribe drugs and clinical information held in separate computer systems,” it says. 

“Clinicians tell us how they have to log-on to many different systems to piece together the whole picture and that there is always a risk that critical information will be missed.”

Published late last month, the prior information notice does not give a potential value for the project.

Great Ormond Street plans to publish a contract notice and pre-qualification questionnaire in the Official Journal of the European Union in late January/early February 2016 leading to contract award around the end of 2016. It is holding provider briefings towards the end of this month.