Royal Brompton to pilot EPMA and EDM

Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust will run pilots of its Medchart electronic prescribing and medicines administration system and Kainos Evolve electronic document management system before the end of March.

Last December, the trust agreed a deal with CSC to deploy its Lorenzo electronic patient record system and Medchart solution; while signing a deal with Kainos for its EDM at around the same time.

Joanna Smith, the trust’s chief information officer, told EHI News the EDM and EPMA implementation plans are “both actively in train”.

Smith said pilots for both systems will take place in one hospital ward before the end of March, to meet the requirements of its successful bids for both projects from the first round of NHS England’s technology fund.

It should receive a total of £2.9 million from the ‘Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards: Technology Fund’ for the two projects.

Smith said the Lorenzo PAS deployment will take longer to implement, with no active online use of the system likely until the end of this year.

To support the trust’s digital care transformation programme, Smith said it has appointed representatives from various departments, including three nurses who are working on the project full-time underneath a newly-selected lead nurse for IT.

“That shows our dedicated clinical focus, and they are in addition to the people who are assigned to each individual project.”

Smith said she is “cautiously very optimistic” about the trust’s implementation plans, given the resources that have been put in to the work.

“I think the trust is showing significant understanding of the effort required – we don’t underestimate the work that we need to do.”

The new systems will help staff to assess its current care pathways and make changes if necessary, while also promoting greater efficiencies and potentially cutting costs, she said.

The trust’s new clinical data warehouse has also gone into service, with 90% of its clinical data now in the warehouse and able to be used in dashboards and clinical analytics.

Smith said the trust has also undertaken a significant upgrade of its infrastructure, with over 2000 of its 2500-3000 computer devices now migrated from Windows XP to Windows 7.

An upgrade of the trust’s core network is largely complete, while it is also upgrading to a new WiFi connection with improved speed and access.

Smith said the trust is also planning to pilot a virtual desktop infrastructure solution soon, as part of plans to improve remote access and potentially move to a bring-your-own-device policy.