No New Year Hangover for EPR

Good afternoon and welcome to the EPR and Clinical Systems January newsletter.In the first month of 2017, the EPR world did not suffer a New Year hangover and was as busy as ever.

We saw trusts being dragged back into the light, huge overspends, and successful go-live's - everything you want to entertain you on those cold winter nights.

Lets take a look at some of the biggest stories that came from the inaugural month of the year.

Cambridge's EPIC Comeback

Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust have been recommended by the Care Quality Commission to be removed from special measures.

The CQC report, which was published earlier this week, has now rated the South East trust as “good”.

The recommendation came following their latest inspection which covered eight main areas including: surgery, critical care and maternity services and then rated the departments upon safety, effectiveness, care, responsiveness and leadership.

The report has also said that previous concerns regarding the Epic EPR, which initially caused the trust to be placed in special measures, have been addressed since their last visit.

After a “significant number of modifications” to Epic, “many of the concerns we had identified at previous inspections had been addressed” the report stated.

Following September's inspection, Chief Inspector of Hospitals, Prof Sir Mike Richards, said he was "recommending that Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is removed from special measures".

After the announcement NHS Improvement said the staff should be "proud of their achievement" after the "fantastic news".

Delay Makes Trust Pay

Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust are expecting a £7.5 million overspend on their Cerner electronic patient record implementation, according to their January Board Papers.

The cost for the deployment is predicted to rise from the originally speculated figure of £4.74m to a monstrous £12.24m - a 258% increase on their initial calculation.

The main reason believed to have caused this astronomical increase is the lengthy delay in the deployment of the new system into the trust, but there is no specific detail as to why.

The West Yorkshire trust were scheduled to go-live on November 19 2016, but have since proposed a new timescale of between March and May this year.

The cause for the lengthy deferral was due to “delays in the migration of data” which have also caused a domino effect on expenditure in other areas of the trust, including a “reduced spend on the estate and equipment”, a spokesperson told Digital Health.

“Migration of patient records from two distinct trusts is pretty unique across the NHS and if successful paves the way for a new approach to the harmonisation of patient records."

Trust Leads the Way, the Med-Way

The University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust have gone live with System C's Medway V4.6 Electronic Patient Record at the Royal Stoke University Hospital and County Hospital replacing a Legacy CSC system.

The deployment, which took place last weekend, has seen the migration of over 63 million records, a combination of the separate master patient indexes at the two sites into a single instance, and the merge with the McKesson Corporation owned company's Patient Administration System that was already in place.

“[It was a] hugely complex go-live at what is a very large and busy trust, [but has] gone very smoothly so far”, Markus Bolton, chief executive of System C, told Digital Health.

“Deploying a system of this breadth at a hospital with multiple sites and over 11,000 staff is a complex task. 7,500 users were trained for the initial go-live”, said Mark Bostock, director of IM&T at the University Hospitals of North Midlands.

The implementation was completed even after the trust had raised concerns regarding the upcoming go-live in their January board papers.

“The key issues considered were largely regarding the necessity for relevant staff to have been trained appropriately ahead of the go-live”.

But the director believes that the trust and System C still “have a lot of work to do together over the coming months as the system settles and evolves and we look forward to progressing together”.

Editor's Note

After another hectic month in the world of EPR, 2017 shows no sign of slowing down and I predict February will be even bigger!!