Digital Health’s monthly roundup of contracts and go lives

Our final roundup of contracts and go lives of 2023 features another big EPR contract win for Nervecentre and Birmingham Women’s and Children’s picking Epic for its EPR.

Ireland’s National Forensic Mental Health Svc. goes live with TrakCare

We start with InterSystems announcing that Ireland’s National Forensic Mental Health Service (NFMHS), has gone live with its healthcare information system, InterSystems TrakCare, to promote a safer, more timely, and efficient care service that will enable clinical staff to spend more time providing greater personalised care experiences for patients.

TrakCare is a health information system and electronic medical record (EMR) for delivering and managing patient care across healthcare institutions. Used every day by hospitals, TrakCare manages more than 400+ million patient records across the globe.

For NFMHS, it delivers individualised care programmes for each patient, based upon their rehabilitation needs involving long-term multidisciplinary team co-ordination to ensure the best possible care and outcomes.

Switching to TrakCare is delivering numerous benefits for the service to enhance patient care and improve patient outcomes. Clinicians now have access to a patient-centric and user-focused unified care record that provides a single view of the patient’s status and data.

Northampton General Hospital announces Nervecentre as EPR supplier

Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust (NGH) has announced that Nervecentre is the preferred supplier for its new Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system.

Across a ten-year programme, Nervecentre’s fully featured EPR will create new opportunities to transform healthcare services at NGH and propel the trust’s digital capabilities to HIMSS level 5 and beyond. With everything together in one place, Nervecentre is proven to improve care, save clinical time, and encourage better decision-making.

The cloud-based Nervecentre implementation will give clinicians access to real-time electronic patient records on mobile devices at the patient’s bedside, replacing millions of sheets of paper per year, helping NGH to be more sustainable.

Nervecentre was confirmed as the preferred bidder after scoring the highest in a rigorous competitive tender process. NGH aims to start deploying Nervecentre in 2025.

South Tees Hospital extends EPR contract with Alcidion

Alcidion has signed a contract with South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, extending the contract for its Miya Precision EPR for a further eight years.

Since 2020, South Tees has activated several Miya Precision modules, helping them to scale their digital initiatives across clinical work streams and logistical operations. The trust has used the platform to digitise patient care processes and records, while also providing a trust-wide orchestration layer to integrate clinical data with patient data in existing systems using the FHIR standard.

The contract extension validates the Alcidion proposition of a modular EPR that allows incremental value to be achieved with less disruption and quicker results. It also underlines the solid foundations South Tees is building for the deployment of advanced clinical-decision support, AI and NLP applications.

With two years left on the existing contract, the extension will see the contract run for a further 10 years, up to 2033.

Birmingham Women’s and Children’s picks Epic for EPR

Next up was news exclusively revealed by Digital Health as Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust picked Epic as preferred supplier for its next EPR.

The specialist trust is understood to have received approval from NHS England for its business case and now awaiting a formal confirmation.

The selection of Epic will mean that the supplier is used by two of the leading paediatric hospitals in the English NHS. Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS FT has used the EPR since 2019.

The selection of Epic at Birmingham Women’s and Children’s may though prove a controversial decision locally. The official digital convergence strategy of the local Integrated Care Board has previously been understood to be standardisation of the locally developed PICS (Prescribing Information Communication System) EPR in use at University Hospitals Birmingham NHS FT.

The decision by NHS England to approve the business case would therefore appears at odds with policies on EPR convergence and placing ICBs in the driving seat on local digital strategy.

Sectra awarded NHS Scotland diagnostic imaging and technology contract

International medical imaging IT company Sectra has been awarded a contract to deliver its cloud-based enterprise imaging service across 15 NHS boards in Scotland, benefiting radiology teams and other healthcare professionals.

The agreement with NHS National Services Scotland (NSS) will provide tools that will support healthcare teams as they review and report on around five million radiology examinations a year, working across NHS Scotland’s organisations.

The contract was signed this month (December 2023) for an initial 10-year term, with two optional extension periods.

The fully managed software as a service (SaaS), Sectra One Cloud, will be used by all of Scotland’s 14 territorial NHS boards and by NHS Golden Jubilee, which also hosts the Scottish National Radiology Reporting Service.

NHS organisations will utilise the radiology, breast imaging, and orthopaedics modules available through the enterprise imaging service.

Belfast HSC and South Eastern HSC go live with Clinisys WinPath

Finally, a major pathology transformation programme in Northern Ireland took a step forward recently with both Belfast Health and Social Care Trust and South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust deploying Clinisys WinPath within days of each other.

The transformation programme is being led by the Business Services Organisation and will eventually see every pathology service in Northern Ireland adopt the laboratory information management system (LIMS) to help modernise pathology services.

Belfast and South Eastern are the first two trusts to deploy the LIMS. Belfast went live with microbiology, blood sciences and biochemistry (including new born screening, haematology and immunology) at the start of November, with South Eastern following three days later with the same disciplines.