Gloucestershire hospitals to deliver EPR with Allscripts

Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is moving to a ‘clinical wrap’ strategy to deliver an electronic patient record (EPR) and achieve the highest levels of digital maturity within five years.

The trust, which delivers a wide range of hospital services from Gloucestershire Royal Hospital, Cheltenham General Hospital, and Stroud Maternity Hospital, will implement Allscripts’ Sunrise Acute Care integrating with the existing patient administration system.

Mark Hutchinson, the trust’s chief digital and information officer, said the approach would enable it to work collaboratively with suppliers to deliver new digital services for clinicians and patients: starting with nursing documentation, paperless outpatients, order communications, and e-prescribing.

The trust’s ambition is to reach level six on the HIMSS EMRAM digital maturity model within two years, and level seven within five years.

“In doing that, we have the intent to make a really-significant improvement in terms of releasing time to care,” Hutchinson said.

“For clinicians, that will mean less time with a pen and paper in their hands, and more time working with information at their fingertips.

And, for patients, it will mean an improvement in the quality of the care they receive.

“This is not an IT project: it is a reliability of care and safety project.”

Implementing EPRs that are open and interoperable is critical to efficient sharing of information between Gloucestershire’s main hospitals

Allscripts Sunrise Acute Care is an integrated EPR that can be deployed as a series of highly-configurable modules to meet trusts’ needs.

It is already in use at high-profile NHS organisations, including Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, a global digital exemplar; and Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust, which is leading development of the clinical wrap approach.

Hutchinson said the system’s UK reference sites, along with its flexibility and configurability, had been key to his trust’s decision to deploy the system.

“When this trust started its digital journey, the promise was that it would have an EPR,” he said.

"Deploying Sunrise Acute Care will deliver on that promise because the Allscripts clinical wrap approach allows you to get straight into improving the safety and quality of care by improving processes and removing cumbersome, potentially-unsafe paper.”

Another factor in the decision was Allscripts’ open architecture and the ease with which it can interoperate with other systems.

This will enable the Gloucestershire hospitals to feed information into Gloucestershire’s JUYI (Joining Up Your Information) portal and to give clinicians secure access to the information it holds via a tab in the EPR; in line with the national imperative to develop IT to support joined-up, integrated care.

Deborah Lee, chief executive of Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Along with improvements in patient outcomes and operational performance; we’re confident that our investment in the Allscripts solution, alongside our existing partnership with InterSystems, which supplies the trust’s Patient Administration System, will rapidly improve our digital maturity and support our strategic ambitions.”

Richard Strong, Allscripts UK managing director, added: “Implementing EPRs that are open and interoperable is critical to efficient sharing of information between Gloucestershire’s main hospitals.

"Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s decision to select the Sunrise solution will position the trust to communicate effectively, improve health outcomes and drive efficiencies.”