Sheffield Teaching Hospitals sets new date for Oracle EPR go-live

Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has set a new date for the go-live of its Oracle Health electronic patient record (EPR), after delaying the rollout of the system last year.

In February 2024 the trust announced a 10-year contract with Oracle Health for an £85 million EPR, which was planned to launch by the end of the year.

However, Kirsten Major, chief executive of Sheffield Teaching Hospitals, told Digital Health News in November 2024 that the trust was not in the “best possible position” for the go-live and had made the decision to delay the rollout to “address some outstanding issues”.

In a chief executive’s briefing to the board on 28 January 2025, Major confirmed a revised go-live date of 14 July 2025 for the EPR.

“Following the decision to defer the planned go-live of our new electronic patient record in October 2024, a significant amount of work has been ongoing within the programme team to carry out a ‘re-plan’ which looks at all of the elements of the programme required to be delivered for a successful go-live, the time this will take and working with the system supplier Oracle Health as to when they have other deployments already scheduled in, to get to a revised go-live date.

“Following approval of the re-plan by the Board earlier in January, the revised go-live date has been confirmed as 14 July 2025,” Major says.

She adds: “This decision in part has been influenced by the need to take an innovation release (in effect an upgrade) for the system by April 2025, for which another round of testing is required to ensure it is working as expected on our version of the system, both from a data migration perspective and a system design perspective, which adds in an element of time to the replan but this is preferable to going live on an untested innovation release.”

Meanwhile, in November 2024 Digital Health News revealed that Airedale NHS Foundation Trust postponed the go-live of its Oracle Health EPR indefinitely to resolve issues and ensure that staff feel confident in using the new system.

The Millennium EPR was initially scheduled to be deployed at the trust in September 2024, but was pushed back until November 2024 to allow further testing to ensure the system is safe and efficient.