King’s picks Allscripts

King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has selected Allscripts to provide its new electronic patient record, which it plans to have in place by the end of 2016.

King’s will replace iSoft Clinical Manager, from CSC, with the full suite of Sunrise clinical modules, but will retain its iSoft patient administration system.

Director of ICT at King’s, Colin Sweeney, told Digital Health the trust bought the system via a Shared Business Services framework after doing extensive market research.

“In some ways we are looking at it as an upgrade of what we have because the core system Allscripts has is the same system as iCM is so the migration path will be a lot easier for us,” he said.

“We wanted a product with continual support and development. Parts of it are going to be familiar to our user base so the training workload will not be as much as if we put in a brand new system and I think we got a relatively good deal, which are all good reasons.”

King’s originally bought its clinical system from Health Vision, which sold to Eclipsys where it was called Sunrise Clinical Manager. In 2002 Eclipsys sold the code and marketing rights to the system in the UK to iSoft, which was then sold to CSC. Eclipsys meanwhile concentrated on the US market where it merged with Allscripts in 2010.

Sweeney said the migration to Sunrise will involve the transfer of around 17 years of patient data.

The trust has done a lot of its own development for iCM, but this would only be equivalent to V3.2 of Allscripts Sunrise Clinical Manger and King's will now be upgrading to V15.

“So it’s a big upgrade, but the same core database,” he explained.

Sunrise will be introduced in a ‘big bang’ approach next year at King’s Denmark Hill site, where it will replace existing functionality such as clinical documentation, electronic prescribing and medicines administration and order communications.

The trust will then look to implement it at the Princess Royal University Hospital, which does not currently use iCM. Sweeney said the deployment at the Bromley site may go ahead without the e-prescribing module, which will roll-out once the rest of the clinical modules are up and running.

“Our hope is that all sites will have Allscripts by the end of 2016,” he said.

Additional functionality that will be available includes improvements to clinical decision support and a much smoother user experience, with easier flow through the system.

It also means the trust can stop using applications developed inhouse that it is struggling to support.

The new EPR will also include a direct link into the trust’s new electronic document management system, which Sweeney said is not being well well used by some staff, partly because it requires a different log-in and password.

“By doing the two together we will get where we need to be as far as paperless is concerned,” he said.

The trust’s contract to retain iPM runs until 2019, when King’s will have to make a decision about whether to change its PAS.

Steve Brain, managing director, Allscripts UK, said: “With this partnership, Allscripts will help King’s Hospital drive adoption of clinical decision support, deliver new models of care and improve patient flow, resulting in better patient care within its population.”