NHS Forth Valley goes live with InterSystems TrakCare

Twelve of Scotland’s 14 regional NHS boards are now running the InterSystems TrakCare electronic patient record (EPR) following a go-live at NHS Forth Valley in April.

NHS Forth Valley migrated three separate legacy patient administration, emergency department and inpatient clinical systems to TrakCare, following “an intensive period of planning and development”.

The deployment means TrakCare is now being used to manage clinical information on 95% of Scotland’s population, according to InterSystems.

Rowen Paton, eHealth and digital programme delivery manager at NHS Forth Valley, said the go-live marked an important step in creating a single electronic patient record that would allow patient information to be followed across acute and community healthcare settings.

“Our small eHealth team, in partnership with frontline staff, has worked tirelessly to deliver this important milestone that will help us meet ambitions in our digital delivery plan, and lay the foundations for a single electronic record that will eventually benefit our whole healthcare system,” Paton said.

“We will continue to develop how the system is used, so that we can build on the board’s existing paper light achievements, drive up data quality further and ease important communication between staff.”

Some 4,000 staff will use TrakCare across NHS Forth Valley’s 860-bed acute hospital and its four community hospitals.

The move towards a single record system is expected to help community services such as GP practices, mental health, community nursing and allied health professionals in the delivery of care.

TrakCare will also support the delivery of a single master patient index and help improve the identification of patients.

Charles King, InterSystems lead in Scotland, said: “NHS Forth Valley has long been forward thinking in digital health, and should be applauded for this latest project in which the board’s highly motivated eHealth team has managed an impressive delivery of digital technology.

“Having already seen the board engage with other NHS organisations in Scotland that use TrakCare, we look forward to NHS Forth Valley becoming an integral member of the TrakCare community, so that through collaboration, the NHS can make the best use of digital technology and joined up information.”

The pervasiveness of InterSystems in Scotland stands in contrast to England, where the supplier holds one of the smallest EPR market shares amongst the major system vendors, according to data from Digital Health Intelligence.

Stockport NHS Foundation Trust recently took the decision to terminate the delivery of InterSystems’ EPR, revealing the system had not gone live since contract was signed in 2015.

In March 2017, InterSystems won a multi-million pound joint-EPR tender across Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust, Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust and Aintree University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.