Barts NHS Trust is expanding and strengthening its informatics team as a direct result of its work to spread a common electronic patient record (EPR) across northeast London.
Over the next few months, Barts Health NHS Trust will create a dozen new informatics roles and review others to better recruit and retain digital experts in an increasingly competitive field.
Extra investment worth up to £2.5m a year will also help strengthen the hard-pressed ICT service desk, aiding them to meet the daily demand for technical support.
Barts NHS Trust got this growth money under the agreement of helping Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals Trust (BHRUT) introduce its version of the Oracle Millennium health records platform over the next two years.
The Barts team will pause any technical upgrades or enhancements to Millennium for about a year
The funding will support closer strategic alignment in Barts approach to informatics, although the two teams will remain operationally distinct.
BHRUT is also paying separately for a dedicated programme team to implement the EPR, which will report directly to Sarah Jensen, Chief Informatics Officer at Barts Health NHS Trust.
As Homerton Healthcare also uses Millennium, the ultimate goal is that medics will be able to share patient information across all acute hospitals and GP surgeries within the north east London healthcare system.
In order to migrate EPR data across to BHRUT, the Barts team will pause any technical upgrades or enhancements to Millennium for about a year.
This is what happened when Whipps Cross joined Millennium in 2012 and Newham in 2017.
Normal business will not be affected, so Barts staff will continue to be able to undertake routine tasks like changing clinic times, updating user accounts and adding new drugs to the meds catalogue.
We won’t start the freeze until we have successfully completed the rollout of WeConnect in April
Jensen said: “We won’t start the freeze until we have successfully completed the rollout of WeConnect in April, and all our own services are in Millennium. In practice most users won’t notice any difference until the integration with BHRUT is finished in June 2025.”
Jensen added: “All the other clinical systems we use in our hospitals will continue to operate as usual.Meanwhile we will be able to strengthen our informatics offer by attracting new talent, retaining key skills and restructuring the team to meet the requirements of our Barts Health customers”.
Andrew Hines, director of group development, said: “The £2.5m is our share of the £44m business case approved for BHRUT, and the latest wave of our multi-year programme of investment into improving all aspects of informatics at Barts Health.”