After rolling out a bespoke EPR at London’s Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability, Cambridge-headquartered PatientSource has signed a contract with another charity in the capital to digitise the delivery of its services.

The Brandon Centre, located in Kentish Town, provides free sexual health, counselling and psychotherapy services to people under the age of 25 that live in north London. It also organises education and training programmes and outreach projects for young people, parents, schools and colleges in the city.

WHY IT MATTERS

Chief executive Julia Brown, who was appointed to the role in June this year, said investment in the clinical IT infrastructure needed to be prioritised, as the charity runs mainly on paper at the moment.

“There are filing cabinets full of records across two of our sites plus warehouses full of archived records. We spend a lot of time entering the same information into databases,” explained lead administrator Sam Weston.

“We also use a paper diary for appointments, which means we often have to ring people back if someone else is using the diary, which isn’t great in terms of the service we are offering. We are hoping that the new PatientSource systems will change all of this,” Weston continued.

With the new contract, a phased deployment will see PatientSource start with drop-in appointments for the charity’s sexual health clinic and then move to digitise all records. Further details regarding timelines were not disclosed. 

THE LARGER TREND

Earlier this year, the British company rolled out a bespoke EPR at The Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability, an independent medical charity. Phil McSweeney, who recently took on the role of executive chair at PatientSource, said clinicians needed an EPR that “enabled their workflow”.

“They [clinicians] should be able to bespoke it, be able to tailor it to their clinical specialism; it should have a completely intuitive user interface and give a satisfying overall user experience. Our approach has always been to offer modular functionality, and we’ve added more modules as the market has requested it,” McSweeney wrote in a recent blog.

ON THE RECORD

Commenting on today's announcement, Michael Brooks, medical director at PatientSource, said in a statement: “We can already see the potential benefits that PatientSource can bring to The Brandon Centre in improving its work processes, making staff more efficient and freeing up valuable time for them to support the young people that need their help.

“We are looking forward to working closely with The Brandon Centre staff in the coming months to ensure that our platform meets their needs.”