GOSH tenders for £50m EPR

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust has gone to tender for an electronic patient record and a clinical and research portal worth £50 million.

The contract is for an initial ten years with an option to extend for another ten. The total value over 20 years is estimated to be £46 – £50 million.

Great Ormond Street’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. 

The document adds that the new ‘digital hospital’ Great Ormond Street is looking to become will include clinical decision support and support for the research community by identifying patients for clinical trials.

“This doesn’t necessarily mean a single computer system and [Great Ormond Street] wishes to consider the benefits, risks and costs of the various options available to us,” it says.

The trust is also looking for support in implementing the cultural change necessary to make the transformation.

The briefing document emphasises that the trust would like not just to be a reference site for its provider, but also a development site for new ideas: “particularly in the areas of the child-friendly, age-appropriate patient portal, the paediatric-specific elements of the EPR and the clinical/ business intelligence and research platform”.

According to Digital Health Intelligence, the trust currently uses CSC's iPM patient administration system and JAC for e-prescribing.

Suppliers must request to participate by 18 March.