Royal Orthopaedic tenders for portal

The Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital NHS Trust has gone out to tender for a clinical portal to support its best of breed strategy towards a full electronic patient record system.

The trust received £3.3m from NHS England’s ‘Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards; Technology Fund’ for its work on the EPR and a clinical portal to integrate all systems into a single patient view.

The trust previously completed the procurement phase for a clinical portal, but after receiving the tech fund money, it went back out to tender in order to “get a better look” at the available options and ensure it has the best value for money.

In a notice placed in the Official Journal of the European Union, it says the contract will be worth £1.3m over seven years, with the option to extend for a further three years.

It also states that the portal should “allow staff to see all electronic information about patients within a single system that would aggregate the data from all other systems” and external health and social care providers in England which refer patients to the trust’s services.

“The clinical portal will also provide external access to information for patients, GPs and referring secondary care clinicians to enable effective and interactive sharing of information,” says the tender notice.

 The trust also wants a portal that allows for patient and carer access.

“This would allow patients to view their own records and interact in their care in an intelligent and proactive manner,” says notice.

“The trust requires a highly flexible, user-friendly solution which incorporates e-forms and integrated work-flow management tools.

“The solution must allow the trust to leverage standard ‘out of the box' content whilst retaining the flexibility to configure the solution to meet local requirements and clinical processes.”

As part of the trust’s EPR project, it completed the procurement process for electronic document management system 18 months ago and chose the Evolve system from Kainos, which it is currently working on implementing.

The trust hopes to award a contract for the clinical portal in February 2015.