South acute group picks InterSystems

A group of three acute trusts in the South Local Clinical Systems programme have chosen InterSystems to provide them with a clinical information system worth up to £60m.

The collaboration of Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust and Yeovil District Hospital NHD Foundation Trust, known as SmartCare, chose InterSystems’ TrakCare from a shortlist of three suppliers.

In a statement, a Gloucestershire Hospitals spokesman told EHI that TrakCare had been chosen as the preferred supplier following a “thorough and detailed” procurement process.

“Trusts will now each prepare a local full business case for consideration by their trust board, and subject to approval, the cases will be aggregated into a combined full business case which will be submitted to the Department of Health and HM Treasury for sign-off.”

The other suppliers on the shortlist were Epic and Meditech.

The grouping is one of six collaborations involving 23 South acute trusts formed to buy a variety of IT systems. The SmartCare group is the first to pick a supplier.

The trusts got nothing from the National Programme for IT and have attracted central funding for their investment plans.

The original tender requested a clinical information system to be delivered on a “remotely hosted, managed services basis” for up to ten years, with a cost between £35m and £60m for all three trusts.

The system will include a patient administration system, order communications, e-prescribing, clinical decision support, A&E, theatres, pathology, pharmacy and stock control, and clinical documentation.

“SmartCare will change the way we work and provide far-reaching benefits including patient records that are constantly kept up to date and available to all healthcare professionals at every stage of a patient’s journey, improved patient safety and one system with one patient record,” the spokesman

According to a recent Gloucestershire Hospitals staff newsletter, over 200 staff from all three trusts took part in an evaluation process of the potential suppliers from January 6 to March 5.

The process included five clinical teams being trained in each system and taking part in a “virtual hospital” exercise to determine their usability, while about 100 staff attended demonstrations to evaluate each system against a range of clinical and administrative scenarios.

The TrakCare system is widely used in Scotland, where it covers 70% of the population, and is in place at the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases NHS Foundation Trust.

 However, it did not have a major English EPR site until this year, when North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust announced in February this year that it had chosen InterSystems as a preferred bidder.

InterSystems could not be reached for comment at the time of publication.