Epic ‘preferred bidder’ for Manchester’s £400m EPR contract
- 5 December 2019
Epic has been designated ‘preferred bidder’ for Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust’s £400m electronic patient record (EPR) contract, Digital Health News can confirm.
Manchester University Foundation Trust (MFT) begun an open procurement process in August 2018 for a future EPR solution capable of meeting its multitude “specialist and complex needs.”
The contract carries a maximum value of £400m, however this figure includes contract extensions beyond an initial 15 year term and any future “reconfiguration of healthcare” in Greater Manchester.
MFT said in its procurement notice that it “expects the initial contracted solution to cost less than this.”
The trust confirmed to Digital Health News on 3 December that Epic was the preferred bidder for the contract.
“We can confirm that Epic is the preferred bidder for our future EPR solution, subject to completion and approval of a Full Business Case,” a statement from the trust read.
“This follows a full Competitive Dialogue procurement process which began in August 2018 and has involved a robust process assessing functionality to suit MFT’s complex organisational needs.”
According to a Government contract notice, the contract was due to start on 1 November 2019, however an MFT spokesperson confirmed that no agreement had been signed.
Currently, three acute NHS trusts have signed with Epic’s EPR solution.
University College London Hospitals went live with the US vendor’s integrated clinical system in April this year, while Royal Devon and Exeter received the green light to proceed with its implementation in June 2018.
Cambridge University Hospitals was the first UK trust to go live with Epic back in October 2014, as part of a £200m digitisation programme.
Manchester University NHS is the largest trust in the UK and is responsible for running nine hospitals across six separate sites.
The trust outlined in its procurement notice that it was looking for a future EPR solution capable of meeting its multitude “specialist and complex needs.”
This includes improving the patient experience by reducing the need for patients to give the same information to different members of staff and reducing delays in accessing paper medical records, as well as enabling staff to access the information they need to care for patients wherever and whenever they need it.
Manchester University NHS is also aiming to improve patient safety by alerting potential medication error, allergies, healthcare-acquired infection risks, as well as help to improve the quality of care provided through clinical decision support and reducing unwarranted clinical variation in treatment.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that a contract had been awarded to Epic by MFT. Digital Health News would like to clarify that no agreement has been signed at this stage and that Epic remains preferred bidder in the procurement process.
13 Comments
I’d be interested to know what the £400 million represents. The contract value? … or the maximum tender value stated in the advert, which may have included multiple lots.
Pretty sure Manchester wanting Epic has been quietly known for a good few years. No surprises here really…
So why has GOSH been entirely forgotten from this conversation?
Great choice for a PAS but the EHR ? Well in order to keep it efficient and fair for all that needs to be mananaged AND DONE @ the NATIONAL level, just what is it that they are DOing @ the NATIONALL level ?
It is rather depressing. With the politicians banging on about not selling the NHS to the US, well – it is already happening when it comes to hugely expensive hospital information systems.
As a disclaimer I actually work for a US healthcare software provider but the scale of the investment required in these ‘one-system solutions’ is incredible.
You’d think best of breed solutions with hospitals working together would be able to come up with something decent for the NHS (oh – we tried that!!).
A single system isn’t solve best of breed issues, it just moves them from being internal dept/specialties issues to the boundaries of the trust/hospital. So less likely to be resolved?
Modern EHRs solve most best-of-breed cleanly and definitively. That’s why this paradigm is riding high these days.
You shouldn’t underestimate the scale of investment required to build a genuinely integrated best-of-breed platform though. It would take much longer and probably cost at least as much as an integrated EHR. It also requires strong architectural discipline to be maintained over a long period, and, crucially, across changes in senior management. Another disincentive to best-of-breed is that in most areas of clinical functionality the big EHR players are (now) at least as good as the specialist systems they seek to replace.
Awesome!! It’s now up to the NHS managers and leaders to stomp up the capability and capacity to deliver the business readiness and change. If anything is buried in the 1970’s it’s the attitudes and leadership for organisational delivery of radical efficiencies and change – with the support of technology.
Good luck to all involved!
FFS
I think I know what your terse response is meant to me Joe, but maybe you could expand.
Well EPIC is proabably the best of the EHR meagsuites and from the narrow perspective of an acute trust I guess you can’t go wrong with something that has its roots in the 1970s and seems to have done a decent Job in Cambridge and UCH.
However, £400 million to lock you data into a proprietary format with something from a US company who architecture predates the Internet becoming ubiquitous and the invention of the mobile phone, let alone Cloud, microservice architectures. Whatever claims might be made EPIC won’t serve the needs of the broader health community and emerging ICSs.
£400 million invested into new approaches to digital health as Dr Tony Shannon and I outlined in 2016 https://www.digitalhealth.net/2016/10/beyond-wachter-1-for-the-99/ would transform UK health and care. £400 million for one trust is a travesty and unsustainable.
Hi Ewan, before saying £400 million over 15 years for one Trust is a travesty and unsustainable can we understand what that is projected to be as a proportion of turnover for what might be a very large trust? If it came to more than 5% of turnover I might agree. We spend less than 0.1% of turnover on our annual EPR Contract – ho hum. Plus whatever else we can get our hands on. But there is a lot more to running ICT in a hospital than running the EPR, as you know.
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