North Tees uses tech fund to support EPR

North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust is using its £7m tech fund monies on a large scale, integrated electronic patient record system project.

The trust received one of the largest sums from the first round of NHS England’s ‘Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards: Technology Fund’ for its integrated PAS/EPR project. 

It will use the money to implement the TrakCare electronic patient record system from InterSystems, and to update infrastructure and hardware.

North Tees became the company’s first major English EPR site when it chose InterSystems as its preferred bidder in February this year.

The trust’s director of finance, information and technology, Lynne Hodgson, told EHI that with the help of the tech fund monies, the trust will aim to have a paperless environment by 2018.

“The central monies will be used to help in the implementation of the TrakCare solution, including infrastructure improvements, up to date hardware purchases and a dedicated internal project team, which will work alongside InterSystems to transform the patient record system,” said Hodgson.

“The monies will also be used to expedite the roll out of our current electronic document management system in line with the EPR timescale and a significant amount will be allocated to enable electronic prescribing, a project that will improve patient safety.”

The trust is currently using a legacy iExpress PAS from CSC, which has been in use at the trust for 26 years and has reached its end of life. The trust will not be able to continue to use the system much beyond spring 2015.

The first phase of the trust’s EPR project will therefore be to go live with TrakCare by June 2015. North Tees plans to deploy the PAS, A&E, maternity and theatre modules in the first instance.

“Phase two will focus on replacing the paper electronic prescribing process with a full electronic prescribing and medicines management system, as well as order communications for hospital orders across both inpatient and outpatient service,” said Hodgson.

“Phase three will review all the remaining processes and systems to see how these can be moved into either the EPR or the electronic document management systems.”

North Tees was one of four trusts receiving more than £7m in funding from the first round of the tech fund, which was launched to support health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s goal of a paperless NHS by 2018, and to help create an integrated digital care record for the health service.

A second round of bidding for what is now called the 'Integrated Digital Care Technology Fund' closed at the start of the week.

Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust was successful in two bids to the first round, one for electronic clinical noting, and the other for digitised health records, bringing its total funding up to £8.2m; the most received by any one trust.

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust received a total of £7.7m for its integrated digital health record programme and an e-prescribing project, and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust won £7.1m in total for two projects: £4m for e-noting and £3.1 for e-prescribing.