Oxford Health plans October EPR go-live

Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust says its new community and mental health electronic patient record system will be rolled out from October this year.

The trust has finalised a five-year contract with Advanced Health and Care to provide its CareNotes EPR, with the ability to extend it to 10 years.

The company will provide a single, integrated and interoperable EPR to be used for all of the trust’s clinical pathways, including child, community and mental health, specialised services and out-of-hours care.

The EPR will capture real-time data and interface with NHS England’s Summary Care Record and the trust’s legacy systems, and will also link with health and social care systems before, during and after a patient’s discharge.

As part of the contract, the company will provide mobile access to clinical records for 3500 clinical staff, including district nurses and community psychiatric nurses.

The trust employs 6200 staff across Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Wiltshire, Bath and North East Somerset.

The original tender from the trust describes the new EPR as a “major change project” and says it must be rolled out to all services by summer in 2015 to ensure the trust can exit its current systems contracts.

EHI reported in April this year that the trust had chosen the supplier as preferred bidder for the EPR. The trust has now signed the contract with the company.

Oxford Health’s director of informatics, Dominic McKenny, told EHI the system will be “highly flexible” and allow trust staff to control its design and customisation.

The EPR will also provide a single replacement the multiple EPRs that the trust currently uses, including two versions of the NPfIT-supplied RiO and one version of TPP’s SystmOne.

McKenny said the trust hopes the EPR will help to include patients in the decision-making process, by providing them and their carers with access to some parts of the system, and “in time” setting up a patient-owned “Patient Health Record”.

He said the mobile access will help clinical staff to make more informed treatment decisions, with more than a third of the trust’s 1.2 million appointments in 2013 taking place in patients’ homes.

McKenny said the trust’s pharmacy and laboratory systems will be the first to link into the EPR, with an implementation planning process starting soon.

He said there will be a phased go-live over the next year, starting in October this year as the trust migrates from the three main systems it is currently using.

Advanced Health and Care beat out five other software providers to win the contract as part of the tender process.

The contract is the company’s third in the NHS community and mental health area, with a further 50 contracts expected to come up for renewal between 2014 and 2016.