[London, UK] The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust has overhauled its Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system in an effort to update its infrastructure, improve workflows for staff and continue to deliver a high availability clinical system.

The trust was one of the first to start looking for a new EPR outside the dismantled National Programme for IT (NPfIT), going live with the Meditech EPR in 2012.

But it soon encountered several issues with its functionality, with NHS Improvement, formerly known as Monitor, having to step in after identifying issues relating to the EPR and the trust’s strategic and financial planning back in 2013.

Speaking to BJ-HC, James Rawlinson, Director of Health Informatics at the trust, revealed they spent two years planning the migration of the entire EPR infrastructure, engaging their main partners, Meditech, Dell and BridgeHead Software to try and “minimise disruption to the organisation” with the new upgrade.

Rawlinson explained the trust conducted two dry runs where they tested the migration, originally planning to upgrade the EPR during the first week of April. 

However, that coincided with the trust going live with paper free referrals for consultant-led first outpatient appointments to meet the October 2018 national switch off deadline, and delayed the upgrade until the following week to “not add any undue stress”.

Rawlinson said the entire process went according to plan, with the trust having a stable system by the next morning, adding that feedback from staff suggested system access for areas such as testing or reporting were already running “faster”.

The trust also recently turned on the link to the Personal Demographics Service, the national electronic database for NHS patient demographic details, from the Meditech EPR, and is now looking to leverage the value of the data that it holds, with all of their analytics platforms and solutions now cloud-based, to help “signpost” teams in “the right direction”.

“Because we’ve got our analytics platform on the cloud, we can leverage the machine learning and AI toolsets that are available on scale within the cloud to start looking at data and picking out patterns of care that we might not have been able to see ourselves,” Rawlinson added, revealing that they have already entered a few partnerships with key ‘AI, data players’, with further announcements expected around the end of summer.