[London, UK] NHS Improvement has approved a business case for Royal Devon & Exeter NHS Foundation Trust (RD&E) to start the implementation of an Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system to replace paper-based processes, part of a £42m transformation programme dubbed MY CARE.

The deployment will start in September this year, with a planned go live halfway through 2020.  

The announcement comes four years after RD&E chose Epic as its preferred supplier for the EPR system.

The trust is currently looking for a new Chief Information Officer, with a spokesperson confirming that recruitment is now ‘underway’.

“The transformation of our services, enabled by the new technology, will give all clinicians a much more comprehensive picture of their patients and their healthcare in a fraction of the time,” said Tracey Cottam, RD&E Director of Transformation and Organisational Development.  

Through the MY CARE programme, patients and authorised clinicians will also have access to the Epic MyChart portal, which was recently rated as the leading patient portal among healthcare professionals in the 2018 Best in KLAS report.  

“Alongside Cambridge University Hospitals, Great Ormond Street Hospital, and University College London Hospitals, RD&E now joins a growing cohort of the United Kingdom’s health information technology leaders who are part of an Epic community where innovation and collaboration are improving patient care,” said Judy Faulkner, Epic CEO and Founder.    

Last year, RD&E sued IT supplier Atos for an alleged breach of a five-year health record scanning and electronic document management services contract, reportedly signed in 2011.

The system provided, which went live the following year, was ‘unacceptably slow’, the trust said, bringing a claim for £7.9m in damages. 

However, a preliminary ruling found that RD&E could only seek the £4.9m cost of its initial contract with Atos.

This week, a spokesperson for the trust told BJ-HC:

“The RD&E no longer has a contractual relationship with Atos.

“The claims and counterclaims between the RD&E and Atos have been settled on terms which are confidential to the parties. As such, we are unable to comment further on these matters.”