Sheffield Teaching Hospitals abandons £400m EPR tender

Sheffield Teaching Hospitals has abandoned a £400m tender for an electronic patient record over “low confidence” in the result.

The trust issued the tender in August 2020 but last month stopped the procurement due to concerns it would not “deliver a competitive result”.

Kirsten Major, chief executive of the trust, told Digital Health News: “The purchase of a new EPR is one of the biggest decisions our organisation will make in the next decade and the choice we make will impact on how we deliver care not just now but into the future.

“Whilst we want maximum benefits in terms of ease of use, adaptability and clinical decision support we also have to balance our aspirations with what is affordable in light of other necessary patient care commitments moving forward.

“After a review of all of the information available from the procurement process to date we have made the decision to stop the process. We will now take a short period of time to decide what the next steps will be and take the opportunity to reflect on our post Covid world and how we have been working for the past 15 months.”

The trust issued a tender to replace its current electronic patient record (EPR) with DXC Lorenzo. It called for three suppliers to submit bids with a “comprehensive range of clinical and administrative” functions, according to the tender notice.

Digital Health Intelligence data shows the trust currently uses DXC Lorenzo for its EPR. The system was installed in 2015 for a period of ten years up to December 2025.

The successful bidder would have been expected to “supply, implement, and maintain” the EPR for a period of 10 years, with a potential to extend at the end of the contract.

It was closed in October 2020 with a successful supplier expected to be announced in December 2020.

But an update to the tender, published in April 2021, revealed the trust “decided not to proceed with this procurement exercise due to low confidence that it will deliver a competitive result”.

Major told Digital Health News the work undertaken as part of the tender had proved “invaluable” to the future direction of the trust.

“The learning and work carried out to date is not wasted and has proved invaluable in terms of bringing clarity to what we need in the future to deliver the quality of care and patient and staff experience we want to provide,” she added.

“This work will also very much inform the next steps that we take in our journey of digital development, but we remain very much committed to the implementation of an EPR as a core part of our health care delivery infrastructure.”

The trust will continue to use DXC Lorenzo’s EPR in the meantime.

Acquisition by Dedalus

DXC Technology recently completed the sale of its healthcare provider software business to Dedalus Group. The deal was originally announced in July 2020 and DXC said it expects to receive around £350million ($450million) from the deal.

In an interview with Digital Health News Dedalus’ regional general manager for the UK and Ireland, Colin Henderson and Will Smart, the former NHS national CIO and now global director of external relations at Dedalus, spoke of what’s next for the company, including the need for better integration and movement of data.

DXC Technology’s Lorenzo EPR system was the local service provider for the North, Midlands and East of England under the National Programme for IT (NPfIT)

Sheffield Teaching Hospitals selected the EPR towards the very end of the NPfIT, was later linked to almost £12m in costs in activity underperformance at the trust, according to 2016 board papers.

Further issues were flagged in the trust’s April 2017 board papers, which revealed Lorenzo’s PAS had a fault that resulted in patient letters being generated but failed to be printed.