Leeds and York go live with Advanced electronic patient record

Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust have gone live with an electronic patient record supplied by Advanced.

The mental health and learning disability trust went live with cloud-based CareDirector during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The solution enables clinicians and administrative staff to access live health information to inform the care they deliver to service users.

Upon going live, the electronic patient record (EPR) enabled about 1,300 staff to work remotely and effectively from home.

With no physical contact allowed, workers that had been planned to support the go-live went from a physical service to a virtual one in five days.

A 24/7 virtual support desk was created the week before go-live, with ramped up capacity. The training programme that was planned to continue through the go-live period also went from physical to virtual in five days, with all training delivered via Teams and Zoom.

Bill Fawcett, chief information officer at Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, said: “CareDirector has helped us to swiftly respond to Covid-19.

“We have been able to move our staff to working from home in just a few days, build real-time trust-wide dashboards of Covid-19 cases and redeploy staff while ensuring they rapidly have the access to information they would need for their new roles.

“In addition, we have reduced the revenue costs of the trust’s core clinical records by 25% and integrated the system with four other key systems in the cloud.”

The CareDirector solution ensures all patients’ data can be recorded and accessed in one place, enabling clinicians to make informed decisions faster and with ease.

It also provides increased capability to manage workloads and teams through dashboards, charts and mobile working.

“CareDirector is the modern system that we urgently needed. As a trust, we were an early adopter of EPR but were using an aging system built on out-of-date technology,” Fawcett added.

“We had a mobile, agile workforce that was being held back by this technology, and it became increasingly apparent that our people were developing digital literacy skills and the ability to perform an enhanced level of data analysis. This led to our decision to innovate beyond the capability of our old system.”

Ric Thompson, managing director health and care at Advanced, added: “For the first time in its history, our CareDirector solution has enabled a trust to deliver more robust information to a workforce that has been required to work remotely – fast and at scale.

“It has been fantastic working with Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust on ensuring this system went live on time. The actions of its confident, skilled and dedicated team have delivered a safe transition to a modern EPR system in the midst of a global pandemic – which won’t have been done too many times before.”