Staffordshire NHS Set For £13m EPR Investment

Staffordshire and Stoke On Trent Partnership NHS Trust will be investing £13m on an electronic patient record (EPR) project.

The news comes following approval to go ahead from the NHS Trust Development Authority, which has allowed a “state of art” system to improve patient information and access recording to be created.

Procurement for the project will begin shortly because the expected go-live date is summer 2015, as the Trust’s finance and resources director, Jonathan Tringham, said the new system is needed quickly.  

“When the Trust was established it inherited more than 30 different clinical IT systems. These meet the needs of individual services but are disconnected from nay central record and result in an incomplete picture of the patient,” he claimed.

“A large proportion of our clinical records are also manual or paper. Record of this kind can only be used in one place and time and restricts joined up working within the partnership and externally with our partners, often delaying some aspects of care,” he added.

To solve these problems, the organisation says it will be deploying an EPR, scanning facilities and a patient portal.

It also represents a move towards meeting health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s “paperless policy” – a target for the NHS to entirely replace paper with digital alternatives by 2018.

Previous Technology Investments

The Trust, which serves 1.1m people in a wide area, has made other recent IT investments, including £5m on new computer equipment.

The Nursing Technology Fund provided £1m of this to be spent on rolling out laptops, clinical tablets and smartphones.

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