Gloucestershire Hospitals suspends RTT reporting after EPR deployment

Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has suspended reporting its referral to treatment times (RTT) following the deployment of a new electronic patient record.

In its February board papers, the southern acute trust said it had stopped RTT reporting because of “concerns regarding data quality, following the migration to TrakCare”.

Gloucestershire deployed TrakCare, InterSystems’ electronic patient record, in December 2016.

TrakCare “operational issues” were blamed for 30 breaches in the two-week target for patients urgently referred by their GP.

It also affected the wait for a small number of people awaiting treatment after being referred through the national screening programme and for non-cancer breast symptoms.

“Concerns regarding data quality, following the migration to TrakCare, has resulted in a decision to cease RTT reporting until the quality of data can be assured.”

The papers said the trust was already manually adding referrals to the new EPR and a “RTT specialist” would be appointed by the end of the month.

“A team of data entry staff are inputting the referral backlogs, after which point the Trust should be able to commence reporting.”

NHS Improvement, NHS England and Gloucestershire CCG had also all been informed of the trust’s RTT recovery plan, the papers said.

In a statement provided to Digital Health News, Sally Pearson, the trust’s clinical strategy director, confirmed the trust had “experienced a period of reduced reporting of RTT due to the complexities of migrating from one system to another”.

Migrating the remaining records by paper should allow the trust to resume “routine RTT reporting” from April.

“We are taking this action to ensure that any potential impact on the quality of care we provide for our patients is avoided.”

NHS Improvement had not imposed financial penalties because of the breach and the trust was already planning the second phase of its EPR roll-out, including test ordering and e-prescribing, she said.

Gloucestershire is one of the three southern trusts that jointly selected the TrakCare EPR in May 2014, in what was called the Smartcare programme.

Apart from the trio, North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust is the only other English trust to deploy TrakCare, although Digital Health News understands several others have recently picked the system.

Yeovil District Hospital NHS Foundation Trust was the first of the Smartcare trusts to deploy TrakCare in June 2016.

The trust was planning to move to “phase two” of its deployment late last year, including pharmacy stock management, clinical noting and theatres.

However, Tony Smith, Yeovil’s medical lead for IT, said this had been pushed back because the England InterSystems team was “overstretched”.

Many of the modules planned, such as pharmacy stock management, were being developed for the NHS in England for the first time, he said.

“I’m not convinced they’ve developed it enough for the requirements for the NHS in England,” he said.

“But some of this is a first of type in England. It’s never been done before.”

Smith said while Yeovil had had some data migration issues, these had since been resolved, and the trust had not stopped reporting RTTs.

Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust, the third Smartcare trust, has yet to deploy TrakCare. Its latest plan is to go-live in spring this year.

InterSystems was contacted for comment for this story.