Sheffield Teaching Hospitals invests £85m in new Oracle Cerner EPR

Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has signed a long-term deal with Oracle Cerner which will see it invest £85 million in a new electronic patient record (EPR).

The trust’s deal with the American firm will last for 10 years and see its current Lorenzo EPR provided by Dedalus replaced with the new Millennium EPR once the current contract expires in late 2024.

The contract was published on a government website and shows that it runs from 16 September 2022 until 21 May 2032. It was awarded via the Health Systems Support (HSS) Framework Agreement.

Kirsten Major, chief executive at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals, said: “We have spent the last three years listening to our staff and determining our future needs post-pandemic so that we could procure a new EPR which will support the continued delivery of efficient, high-quality patient care.

“We have visited other trusts to learn from their experiences and only after a very rigorous clinical and financial evaluation have we chosen Oracle Health as the provider for the new Electronic Patient Record system. We were successful in securing national funding and preparatory work is now underway to support a go-live in 2024.”

The new procurement comes almost two years after the trust abandoned a £400 million EPR tender over “low confidence” in delivering a “competitive result”.

Major described the contract as “one of the biggest investments by the trust in over 20 years” and said it is “just one part of a wider transformation programme to change our processes and pathways so that we can get maximum patient benefit from a new integrated EPR”.

She highlighted that a “key consideration” when looking to implement a new system was the “potential for the integration of other systems and interoperability with other NHS partners in the future”.

Sheffield Teaching Hospitals is the first trust in the ICS to purchase Oracle Cerner’s EPR. Barnsley Hospital – part of the same ICS – also choose to leave Dedalus’ Lorenzo EPR and went live with System C’s EPR in 2020.

Major added: “We will reduce the number of different IT systems currently in place to make it easier and quicker for staff to access a single, contemporaneous and accurate source of information.

“We also want to introduce a patient portal in future phases of the system’s implementation to enable patients to access their medical records and book/manage their appointments.”

Preparatory work is now underway within the trust to support a go-live of the new EPR in 2024.