Govt EPR targets ‘a good thing’

The government’s ambitious targets for electronic records in NHS trusts are achievable and will deliver safer patient care, Cerner’s UK boss says.

Health secretary Jeremy Hunt announced earlier this year that he wanted electronic records and communications in place across health and social care by 2018.

Hospitals are supposed to have plans in place for electronic patient records by next April, with full implementation a year later.

Emil Peters, Cerner’s new vice-president and general manager for the UK and Ireland, said there was a lot of excitement around the UK health IT market being very much an area of growth.

“Any time that someone sets a target to say – ‘we need to be doing this by a certain date’ – I think that’s a good thing, as it only creates conversations and information sharing.

"A lot of people are talking about what it might mean for them so it’s an exciting time,” Peters told eHealth Insider.

“We are encouraged by ambitious targets as if you don’t set ambitious targets you probably won’t meet them.”

Peters said Cerner had the experience to help trusts already on the way to EPR as well as those “starting from zero”.

“We can take them to fully functioning status with these timeframes, it’s really down to getting started,” he explained.

“We really look forward to not only things going towards a paperless model, but others things we can do with liberated information, when data is out of silos and able to be consumed by different applications in different environments by different providers and patients and families as well.”

He said the UK was using technology to make practising medicine more efficient and safe and that it was a showcase for other parts of the world.

“Here is where this vision is really being put into practice. The NHS is definitely held up as a model, even for the US.”

Peters said community health was seen as a priority for the company as part of its population health management model.

“The way we look at data and information is to liberate it, make it available for everyone, so putting community right in the mix is going to be a huge upflift for the health service,” he explained.

“Across Cerner we are looking to make it more flexible for organisations designing solutions, not just to operate with one another but how they operate in a more global environment."

Cerner was putting forward its own hosting service as the gold standard to support its EPR and hoped clients would see the benefits of that as National Programme for IT in the NHS contracts expired.

He said the company was pushing for trusts to do more inputting of clinical notes into Millennium as that was when the “lighthouse solutions” that highlighted specific issues could be effective.

“Information and IT is so much part of our daily lives, we’re surrounded by it so it’s great to see the health service really embracing it,” added Peters. “It’s part and parcel of a lot of answers in every industry.”

Cerner also recently announced that it is buying PureWellness, a US health and wellness company which develops solutions to enable population health, individual engagement and measurable lifestyle improvements.