Lincolnshire Partnership switches on new mental health EPR

Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust has switched on its new electronic patient record system just six months after singing up a new supplier.

Over 2000 members of staff at the mental health trust can now access digital referrals, community and inpatient records of its 202,080 patients via the Servelec RiO clinical system.

The RiO electronic patient record (EPR) has been configured specifically for the needs of Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (LPFT) to make it “completely patient centric” and accessible across multiple devices.

Further, the system has been programmed with the capability to work offline. Because Lincolnshire is a largely rural county, internet connectivity is not always consistent. As such, in the event that connection to the internet is lost, the EPR will save work offline, which can then be synchronised once a connection is re-established.

Sarah Connery, director of finance and information at LPFT, said: “We have worked closely with Servelec, staff, commissioners and patient representatives to build a specification that best meets our needs.

“We now feel we have developed an easy to use, intuitive but robust clinical system that can enable our staff to work as effectively and efficiently as possible to care for our patients.

“It is still early days as we only went live with the Rio system at the beginning of September – but we look forward to being able to evidence the benefits of the investment once the system is bedded in.”

LPTF signed up Servelec HSC to replace its ageing Silverlink Mental Health EPR in April.

Servelec provided data migration tools to support the LPFT data analysts to extract core data from the Silverlink system to its new RiO EPR.

Neil Laycock, managing sirector of Servelec’s healthcare business, said: “Long-term care is at the centre of Rio’s design principles and we’ve designed it to be completely patient-centric for LPFT.

“The team wanted it to be available on multiple devices, which are all essential, given the locations and job roles of users and patients. Rio will give the LPFT team more time with patients, to care for them, as opposed to administrating around them.”

In June, LPFT signed a five-year deal with Civica for an electronic prescribing system.