An NHS organisation in Greater Manchester has gone live with the Sunrise Acute Care electronic patient record system from Chicago-headquartered health IT giant Allscripts. 

Bolton NHS Foundation Trust, a provider of hospital and community health services, started using the EPR in A&E and across all of the wards at Royal Bolton Hospital at the beginning of October 2019.

It adopted a clinical wrap approach for the implementation, retaining its existing, third-party patient administration system and wrapping clinical functionality with Sunrise Acute Care. 

The emergency department is now using the system for electronic prescribing and order communications, and the wards for e-prescribing, order communications and clinical documentation. 

In addition, Bolton is now live with what it calls a “first of type” interface between Sunrise and a pharmacy system from EMIS Health, which will allow the organisation to introduce closed loop medicines administration, a key requirement of the HIMSS Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM).

The trust has also worked with Allscripts to deploy the first elements of an electronic document management system, which it says will help support business continuity planning.

THE LARGER PICTURE

With the go-live, Bolton joins a number of NHS organisations in the Greater Manchester area that have partnered with Allscripts. 

Towards the end of last year, a trust in the south west of England, Gloucestershire Hospitals, went live with Sunrise only five months after signing a contract with the company, and used the clinical wrap approach for the deployment. 

WHY IT MATTERS

There has been a lot of debate in the past few years about the NHS’s plans to digitise. Last year, secretary Matt Hancock announced a new unit, called NHSX, would be created to help transform the use of technology across the health service. 

Last week, the government said £40m would be set aside for a project aiming to reduce the administrative burden on staff. In some places, clinicians said they had to log into as many as 15 different computer systems when taking care of a patient.

ON THE RECORD

“This go-live was not only a ‘big bang’ implementation, but one of the largest scopes for an initial deployment of Sunrise Acute Care that we have seen in an NHS trust,” said Allscripts MD for EMEA Richard Strong.

“Bolton’s success is also an endorsement of the clinical wrap approach that we are seeing adopted by an increasing number of UK trusts, and we look forward to working with the Trust on the next phases of its digital journey,” he added.

Phillipa Winter, chief information officer at Bolton, said: “After months of planning, it was fabulous to be able to celebrate a successful go-live and a significant step in our digital transformation journey. The implementation has been a testament to the partnership, commitment and teamwork of the trust, its suppliers and their implementation teams.”