Guy’s and St Thomas’ issues £175m tender for new EHR

Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust is on the hunt for an electronic health record (EHR) after publishing a tender worth £175million.

The contract includes a requirement for GPs to have direct access to the EHR as well as having the option of linking up to King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and possibly Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust.

The tender also reveals the duration of the contract is initially 120 months but there is an option for a contract renewal.

It says: “Individually, these systems are well-established and used by staff as the primary application for their purpose. However, collectively the core applications provide differing capabilities in support of the day-to-day clinical and operational processes, which results in data not being integrated and managed as a single dataset.

“This requires effort and cost to integrate views of data from different sources, additional time to view ‘longitudinal’ data about a patient through several applications, and in some cases manual re-entry by front line clinical staff of data captured elsewhere.”

Suppliers must request to participate by 5pm on 10 June.

As to what suppliers will make a bid, the trust said “unable to comment on bidders that submit an expression of interest while the tender exercise is ongoing”.

According to Digital Health Intelligence, Guys and St Thomas’ currently has DXC Technology’s i.CM EPR system installed. The system has been in place since 2002.

In 2012, the trust was one of the iSoft7 – a group of trusts in London and the South that chose to stick with their iSoft (before it became part of DXC Technology) i.PM systems ahead of the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

Other trusts in the group included King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust (GOSH). Both trusts have since changed EPR providers, according to Digital Health Intelligence.

King’s now uses Allscripts’ Sunrise EPR system while GOSH announced in 2017 that it had selected US company Epic after it issued a £50million tender.

Digital Health News also reported in 2012 on the Guy’s and St Thomas’ digital efforts, which included plans to invest £213 million in IT from 2012 to 2017.