Exclusive: Great Ormond Street picks Epic in potential £50m deal

Great Ormond Street NHS Foundation trust has selected Epic as its preferred electronic patient record supplier.

In a statement provided to Digital Health News, the London specialist children’s hospital confirmed it had selected the US company to support its “clinical transformation programme and digital strategy.”

Great Ormond is the fourth UK trust to select Epic, one of biggest EPR suppliers in the US.

Only one UK trust, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, has deployed the system to date.

Along with Epic, the trust also announced it had selected Aridhia Informatics to deploy a new “research and innovation platform”.

Aridhia is Scotland-based company that has worked with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde to analyse brain injury data.

The total value of the deal was not disclosed.

However, Digital Health News reported in February last year that the original tender covering both systems was valued at between £46 – £50 million over 20 years.

The trust plans to deploy the innovation platform later this year and the Epic EPR in 2019. Both systems will be cloud-based.

As well as providing a single system for clinicians, the EPR will also have a patient portal, where children and their families can access health information and book appointments.

Shankar Sridharan, chief clinical information officer at the trust, said the switch to Epic would change the ways clinicians worked.

“The implementation of a paediatric hospital EPR system at GOSH will change the way we work as clinicians, helping us to deliver holistic care for our complex patients and facilitate communication with families.”

The trust said 200 staff had had input into the procurement, along with patient representatives. The trust have also reviewed the systems used at 16 different hospitals as part of the procurement.

In particular, trips to two children’s hospitals in Philadelphia and Cincinnati, both of which were using Epic to “empowered clinical transformation”, had persuaded staff to pick the EPR.

While Cambridge’s Epic deployment in 2014 had led to severe clinical and financial problems at the time, Great Ormond said Cambridge experience had also swayed its choice.

“It was clear [Cambridge] have put their initial problems behind them and the system was delivering significant benefits and supporting the organisation to deliver better clinical care.”

According to Digital Health Intelligence, Great Ormond does not have an overarching EPR. It has a CSC iPM patient administration system and JAC for e-prescribing.

When the EPR was put out to tender last year, the trust said staff were frustrated by the current IT systems, which are “complex and often difficult to use”.

A full business case for the Epic and Aridhia systems will probably go to the trust’s board in April.