Salisbury tenders for EPR

Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust has gone out to tender for an integrated electronic patient record system.

The trust currently uses the iPM patient administration system developed by iSoft, which was bought by CSC in 2011.

Salisbury is one of so-called iSoft 7 trusts that signed a deal with the company to stick with their existing systems, instead of becoming part of the National Programme for IT.

The seven trusts in London and the South would have been slated to take Cerner Millennium as part of the programme.

They signed the iSoft deal in 2006, and extended it in 2011 to 2016, taking over the contracts from NHS Connecting for Health in the process.

A tender notice, published in the Official Journal of the European Union, says that Salisbury is looking to procure a “fully managed service to provide an integrated EPR.”

It wants the new technology to “improve the quality of care delivered to patients through better recording and appropriate sharing of information.”

The trust also wants it to improve patient safety by providing enhanced clinical decision support and allow patients to book appointments electronically and have access to their own medical records “when appropriate.”

The tender says the EPR will also help to reduce “the cost and complexity of the IT landscape by replacing currently separate interfaced applications with an integrated solution” and reduce its dependence on paper notes.  

Salisbury has developed an in-house portal, called Clinician’s View, to give clinical staff access to all patient information such as tests, diagnoses and treatments on a single page.

The portal displays information from more than 20 of the hospital’s 55 departments and currently works as its EPR. The trust has also begun to roll out single sign-on as part of the portal project.

The iSoft 7 were: Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, King’s College Hospital, Guys and St Thomas’, Epsom and St Helier, University Hospital Lewisham, Salisbury, and Plymouth Hospitals NHS trusts or foundation trusts.