Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is moving to a ‘clinical wrap’ strategy to deliver an electronic patient record (EPR) and increase its digital maturity over the next five years.
The trust, which delivers services from Gloucestershire Royal Hospital, Cheltenham General Hospital and Stroud Maternity Hospital, is planning to implement Allscripts Sunrise Acute Care in an integration – effectively the ‘wrap’ – with its existing patient administration system.
Mark Hutchinson, the trust’s chief digital and information officer, said the approach would enable it to work collaboratively with its suppliers to deliver new digital services for clinicians and patients
It plans to begin with nursing documentation, paperless outpatients, order communications and e-prescribing.
Maturity ambition
The trust’s ambition is to reach level six on the HIMSS Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model within two years, and level seven within five.
“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, that will mean an improvement in the quality of the care that they receive. This is not an IT project: it is a reliability of care and safety project.”
He added that the trust made the choice of the Allscripts software because it is sufficiently flexible and configurable, with an open architecture, to use with the patient administration system.
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.
Image by Jonathan Billinger, CC BY SA 2.0
