Digital Health’s monthly roundup of contracts and go lives

Our latest roundup of contracts and go lives features the long-awaited federated data platform (FDP) contract award by NHS England to Palantir.

NHS England awards £330m Federated Data Platform contract to Palantir

We begin with one of the biggest health and data stories of the year as NHS England announced that they have officially awarded a contract to operate its future federated data platform project (FDP), worth £330 million, to US data analytics giant Palantir, with support from Accenture, PwC, NECS and Carnall Farrar, NHSE officially announced.

Palantir was widely seen as the favourite to win throughout the procurement in partnership with Accenture, and has now been selected ahead of rival bidders including Oracle and IBM.

The contract award will see investment over the course of seven years as more trusts join the platform, the NHS confirmed. In the first contract year, investment is expected to be at least £25.6m. Over the contractual period of seven years, there will be up to £330m investment in the Federated Data Platform and associated services.

NHSE states that no company involved in the FDP can access health and care data without the explicit permission of the NHS. All data within the platform is under the control of the NHS and will only be used for direct care and planning. It will not be used to access data for research purposes and GP data will not feed into the national version of the software platform, it adds.

Northamptonshire goes live with integrated shared care record

The Northamptonshire Care Record (NCR) is now live, joining up care records for more than 800,000 people in the county and ensuring that the professionals directly involved in their care can instantly access the information they need to support them, wherever they are in the region.

The first phase of the go-live is complete, with the system combining more than 829,000 individual records from patients registered with GP practices in Northamptonshire with patient data from Northampton and Kettering General Hospitals and Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (NHFT).

The system is now available for all GP practices across Northamptonshire and is in the process of being rolled out to all health and care providers at NHFT and Northampton and Kettering General Hospitals this month.

The next phase of the project will be for the shared records to also include data from other local organisations, including social care providers, the voluntary and community sector, and East Midlands Ambulance Service.

DrDoctor awarded Lewisham and Greenwich contract to roll out PEP

DrDoctor has announced it has been awarded a contract by Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust (LGT), to roll out a patient-engagement platform (PEP) to give patients more control over their own care.

DrDoctor’s PEP, alongside its partner Patients Know Best (PKB), will be used by LGT to deliver a more personalised care journey. Once fully integrated with the trust’s existing systems – Cerner Millennium, Rio and Soliton – in 2024, the two platforms will enable patients to view upcoming appointments and clinical data in real-time.

Logging in with DrDoctor, via the NHS App, patients will be able to view appointments, compare them against other available slots, and confirm, cancel, or re-arrange to a more suitable time.

South Eastern HSC Trust first NI trust to go live with Epic EPR

A new electronic patient record (EPR) has gone live at South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust in Northern Ireland, the first step in digitising health and care records in the country for more efficient care.

The deployment of the encompass EPR, from Epic, has – according to the Department of Health – been a “culmination of over seven years of work”.

With South Eastern HSCT the first trust in Northern Ireland’s go-live, the remaining trusts are set to follow on a phased basis throughout 2024-2025. The Belfast Trust is next for the encompass go-live, and will then be followed by the Northern, Western and Southern trusts. The 10-year deal was signed back in 2020 and is worth £275m.

Two Derbyshire trusts pick Nervecentre as preferred supplier for joint EPR

University Hospitals of Derby and Burton (UHDB) and Chesterfield Royal Hospital (CRH) have announced Nervecentre as the preferred supplier for a new joint electronic patient record (EPR) system.

The collaborative approach to procuring an integrated EPR solution across the two neighbouring trusts is set to bring significant benefits to patients and staff and will mean both acute providers within Joined Up Care Derbyshire Integrated Care System (ICS) will be using the same system.

During the competitive tender process, including demonstration days and site visits to other NHS trusts who are using the systems currently, seven EPR providers presented their solutions and were scored on their social value, technical response, demonstration and commercial elements.  

Nervecentre scored highest overall and are the confirmed preferred bidder as the two trusts submit a full business case in February 2024.

The new EPR system, which will take up to two years to fully implement, has a modern interface and works on mobile devices, meaning staff can have easy access to patient records at the bedside.

The Nervecentre deployment will replace Meditech at Queen’s Hospital Burton, Lorenzo at the Royal Derby Hospital, and the best-of-breed systems currently used at Chesterfield Royal Hospital.

Wolverhampton’s 10-yr EPR deal with System C propels digital maturity

The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust (RWT) has just signed a 10-year contract with System C for an integrated electronic patient record (EPR) system, which will replace the trust’s in-house built EPR and accelerate its digital maturity and roadmap.

RWT, which is one of the largest acute and community providers in the West Midlands, will be taking a two-step approach to the roll out. The first phase will see the trust’s legacy patient administration system (PAS), emergency department (ED) and theatre systems replaced, before the remainder of the EPR’s clinical functionality – including CareFlow Planning, Patient Flow, Clinical Workspace and PHR Integration – is rolled out in phase two.

The project will start in November 2023 and complete with the PAS, ED and theatres’ functionality in 2025 – ahead of NHS England’s target for every trust in England to have an EPR.

By deploying the latest iteration of System C’s CareFlow EPR, the trust will modernise the way it delivers electronic patient notes across services and integrate all aspects of the care pathway such as order comms, test resulting and electronic prescribing, including medicines administration.