Southern trusts tender for EDM

Three southern trusts have jointly tendered for an electronic document management system under a ten-year contract worth £5m-£10m.

Known collectively as the EDM Collaborative, Frimley Park Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Trust and Heatherwood and Wexham Park Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust will pick a single supplier, but will sign separate contracts.

The tender is the fourth to come out of the acute element of the Southern Local Clinical Systems Programme, set up to support trusts that received nothing under the National Programme for IT.

The government has approved more than £80m of central funding for the six groups of southern acute trusts participating in the programme to buy clinical IT systems. The 23 trusts involved will also contribute more than £100m locally.

The tender document says the combination of EDM software with separately procured scanning services is “viewed as a key transformation programme leading to a best of breed approach to an electronic patient record” for the three trusts.

“The aim of the EDMS Collaborative is to fully digitise the current paper medical records, whilst making them easily accessible for multidisciplinary team working at any trust site, and ensuring they contain contemporaneous information,” it says.

“This will enable each trust to implement electronic medical records and forms, and enable working towards the future of a paperless NHS by 2018.”

Frimley Park chief executive Andrew Morris told EHI last March that the trusts decided to work together because they had similar patient administration systems and EPR strategies.

“We are all putting best-of-breed systems in and working on putting a portal in to support clinicians. Obviously part of the strategy is getting to EPR and in doing so the very last bit of it is the EDM,” he said.

“The opportunity of working on a collaborative basis came up and we thought this is an area of mutual interest and we’ll put a proposal in.”

The tender says the three trusts currently create paper patient records and store them on site. Older records are gradually moved to other storage sites and retrieved when necessary.

The new system will include: provision of an integrated front-end view of scanned documents; the ability to search, retrieve and manipulate electronic documents; and provision of a non-proprietary architecture based on industry-standard platforms.

The tender says a clinical portal is a desirable element of the procurement, but it is recognised that not all EDM suppliers provide this capability, so it carries a weighting which reflects this approach.

Requests to participate are due by 4 March.