The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust (RWT) has just signed a 10-year contract with System C for an integrated electronic patient record (EPR) system.
The company said it will replace the trust’s in-house built EPR with its CareFlow EPR and accelerate its digital maturity and roadmap.
RWT is planning to take a two-step approach to the roll out. The first phase will involve the replacement of its legacy patient administration system (PAS), emergency department (ED) and theatre systems, before the remainder of the EPR’s clinical functionality is rolled out in phase two.
The project will begin in November 2023 and complete with the PAS, ED and theatres functionality in 2025 – ahead of NHS England’s target for every trust in England to have an EPR.
Procurement challenge
Nick Bruce, group director of digital technology at RWT and the Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust, said: “Anyone who has been faced with the challenge of procuring a new EPR as part of a digital transformation programme will appreciate the amount of work involved to get us to this point. It’s now reassuring for us to be on the starting line of a major deployment with a credible partner that has a proven track record of delivering high class enterprise-wide systems fit for the future.
“We’ve had our current PAS for over 20 years, so we want to undertake a phased approach to acknowledge the level of transformation involved and ensure our staff feel comfortable with the scale of change needed. Once live, the EPR will allow clinical teams to see a single view of a person’s entire clinical record, which means our staff can have access to the right information, in the right place, at the right time.”
The CareFlow EPR will late be integrated with the one already used by the Walsall trust, and with others across the Black Country Integrated Care System.
