Royal Liverpool records digitalised ahead of new EPR

Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust have digitalised tens of thousands of records ahead of announcing a new EPR.

During the past few months, 50,000 records have been digitalised. This is particularly important ahead of the deployment of new EPR but also for the New Royal Hospital, scheduled to open September 2017, which does not have the capacity to store paper records. 

Royal Liverpool has also created an in-house electronic document management system, called Patient Electronic Note System (PENs) to assist with the transition. The trust’s July board papers show that 650 forms were available through PENs with more than 128,000 electronic forms completed to date in over ten specialities. 

David Walliker, director of IT at Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals, said PENs was a “game changer” for the Royal Liverpool.

The EPR for the new hospital has not yet been revealed but the Royal Liverpool currently operates on a best of breed range of systems, several of the developed in-house.

Royal Liverpool, Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust and Aintree University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust went to tender in November 2014 for a new integrated electronic patient record system.

Walliker said he was not able to comment on which EPR has been selected as it was still waiting on NHS England sign-off. However, the system that had been picked was the “best clinically”. The announcement will be made in October or November this year and was expected to go-live about 18 months later.

Currently there are nine different EPRs across the city.

With the clinical documentation in place for the EPR through PENs, Walliker said the trust “now only need to replicate that in the supplier’s EPR, and where they cannot be replicated, we can continue to use PENs”.

The July board papers also stated that the trust’s clinical portal, Unity, will display PENs forms and scanned paper records and in July scanning of case notes will begin, ready to be operational by the end of the year.

The new 12-storey hospital will have 646 beds in individual en-suite rooms. Walliker said part of the IT strategy includes developing “safe room solutions” such as sensors.

Preparation for a new EPR has been years in the making, with the trust migrating 87 million images to its new SynApps vendor neutral archive in anticipating of the move in November 2013.

The New Royal will cost about £335 million and the trust, with assistance from the Department of Health, has contributed £124 million.

Read more:
* Liverpool trusts in £70m EPR tender
* Twelve million records shared in Merseyside