Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS FT is to go-live with its electronic health record system on Thursday 5 October.
The trust will launch the Epic electronic health record, said to “bring together hundreds of different systems”, and also introduce MyChart to support patients with online access to health records.
To support the transition, the trust shared some of the changes patients should expect over the next few weeks, covering in-person appointments, video appointments, blood tests, maternity, reconfiguring preferences, and text message reminders. These changes include “changing the system for video appointments from Attend Anywhere to Microsoft Teams” and using “MyChart to replace the current app, BadgerNet”.
In January, we covered a final review into an IT critical incident on 19 July, in which two separate data centres at Guy’s Hospital and St Thomas’ Hospital suffered failures associated with a heatwave. The report highlighted that at the time, the trust had 371 legacy IT systems that support patient records, patient administration, clinical services and infrastructure. The review collated a series of investigations following the incident, covering the trust’s methodology, timeline of events, main findings and recommendations for the future. A key consideration of the report was to move to an electronic health record said to be “a key part of the rationalisation and consolidation of legacy IT systems”.
More recently, we covered the news of the trust developing a new IT platform capable of identifying “high risk” diabetes patients from waiting lists, with the trust sharing how the platform is “enabling them to be prioritised for urgent care and contributing to a reduction in health inequalities”.
Last week we published our interview with David Newey, chief information officer at The Royal Marsden, who shared their EPR journey and the markers of successful digital innovation.
On Friday, we shared a recent HTN Now webinar that focused on the role of EPR training and reducing the productivity slump at go-live.
