Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh go-live with Sunrise

Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with Allscripts Sunrise electronic patient record, deploying it across five sites.

The new EPR went live at the North West trust on Tuesday morning, with a spokeswoman saying at 4pm that it was “going well”.

 By 3pm, the trust ha sent out a tweet thanking people for their “patience while staff are still updating to the new system”.

Sunrise is now deployed at Royal Albert Infirmary in Wigan itself, Leigh Infirmary, Wrightington Hospital, which provide more specialist services, particularly for elderly patients, the Thomas Linacre Centre, which handles outpatients, and the Wigan Eye Unit.

The trust announced in September 2014 that it had chosen Allscripts as its preferred supplier. At the time, Liverpool Heart and Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trusts were the only UK organisations live with Sunrise.

Since then, Allscripts has also won the contract to provide IT to the University Hospital of South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust, which is due to go live shortly after Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh.

Further trusts in the area may opt for the same technology, as part of a ‘hospital chain’ being developed across Greater Manchester.

The new system includes a patient record, ordering and testing and e-prescribing and replaces a hodge podge of legacy systems.

Sunrise went live in parts in the A&E department at 8am on Tuesday morning, by which time all elective patients had been migrated to the new system.

In a statement on Tuesday morning, chief executive Andrew Foster said the system would “slowly trickle down to the rest of the hospital”, with outpatients expected to be migrated within the next few weeks.

Representatives from trust that have already deployed Sunrise, including Salford Royal, Liverpool Heart and Chest and University Hospital of South Manchester, were also onsite on Tuesday to support the roll-out.

Foster said the project had been “massive”, with 18 months of preparation, testing and training involving 300 staff.
 
“It is an exciting time for the trust and we feel quite positive about the launch of HIS [Health Information System].”

Stephen Dobson, the associate director of information management and technology, said it would an “intense” few weeks as the system bedded in.  

“We request our patients to bear with us during this period as we take on this huge step to support the delivery of safer, faster and more efficient care.”