Gloucestershire Hospitals turns around Allscripts go-live in five months

Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with the Allscripts Sunrise electronic patient record (EPR) just five months after signing with the company.

Two early adopter wards went live with nursing documentation and risk assessments in November, with a further 22 wards going live two weeks later.

All 24 adult inpatient wards at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital are now actively using the Sunrise EPR, Allscripts said.

As a result, some 1,500 nursing staff now have easier, faster access to information about their patients and enable bed managers to see the status of beds across the hospital.

The trust was due to start the implementation of the EPR in summer 2020, but accelerated the deployment so that staff were better equipped to manage high levels of demand expected this winter.

Mark Hutchinson, chief digital and information officer at Gloucestershire Hospitals, said the trust had been able to deploy the EPR more quickly because it had access to a blueprint developed by Allscripts and its customers.

“With a busy winter ahead, we were determined to do everything that we could to support better, safer decision making for our staff,” said Hutchinson.

“We ran a very successful pilot and then put all our energy and resources into supporting staff on 24 wards at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital to go-live with this system.

“Throughout the training and testing period, the response from clinicians was overwhelmingly positive, so this has been an exciting time for the organisation.

“We are determined to push on and achieve our aim of using technology to support the kind of high-quality care that our patients deserve, and our staff aspire to deliver.”

Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust signed with Allscripts in May, with the ambition of moving from less than level 1 on the HIMSS EMRAM digital maturity model to level 6 within two years.

To do this, it has adopted a ‘clinical wrap’ strategy that leaves its existing InterSystem TrakCare patient administration system in place and ‘wraps’ clinical functionality around it. Allscripts’ blueprint provides a guide for doing this that draws on the experience of the other NHS trusts using Sunrise.

The first two wards to go live with Sunrise include an ENT surgical ward and a renal general medicine ward.

Owing to the success of the phase one rollout in Gloucestershire Royal Hospital, the phase two implementation of Sunrise at Cheltenham General Hospital is being brought forward to February 2020.

Richard Strong, vice president and managing director, EMEA, Allscripts, said: “When Gloucestershire Hospitals said it wanted to bring forward its first Sunrise go-live in order to address winter pressures we were very happy to help.

“The fact that it has been able to go-live in such a short period of time is a tribute to the hard work of everybody involved at the trust and to the Allscripts UK deployment team. It is also a testament to the scalability of the clinical wrap strategy, when supported by our UK content blueprint.

“We look forward to working with the trust on further deployments and on helping it to achieve its stated ambition to join the select band of HIMSS 6 trusts in the UK.”