Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals has published its annual plan for 2024/25, highlighting work towards a new £44 million electronic patient record due to be launched in 2025, improvements in digital infrastructure, new commitments to data sharing, and more.
One of the upcoming projects the plan highlights is the delivery of a new EPR, following an investment of £49 million in infrastructure, the modernisation of clinical equipment, and the laying of digital foundations in preparation for the EPR’s launch in spring of 2025.
On the delivery of its wider digital strategy and the EPR, the trust plans to deliver benefits by enhancing the digital network to support the planned expansion and maintain cyber security, converting paper to digital workflows, enhancing electronic document exchange with GPs, enabling image sharing through a shared imaging portal, enabling primary care to “order diagnostic tests electronically”, implementing a maternity EPR, and sharing data with primary and acute care organisations through the London Care Record.
The document sets out plans around developing an Acute Provider Collaboration, with the aim of delivering “better results” by ensuring equal access, offering a more inclusive place to work, and working together to reduce health inequalities. Priorities for this work having joined up business intelligence systems “which support clinical care across North East London as a whole”, and identifying and harnessing digital innovation to “improve outcomes for patients”.
The plan also notes the need to reduce over testing of patients as high priority, stating that this is not helped by the absence of digital demand management tools “which are a crucial part” of the digital roadmap.
To read the plan in full, please click here.
In other news from Barking, Havering and Redbridge, the trust recently shared an update on the impact of its frailty virtual ward playing a role in helping to keep frail older people out of A&E, highlighting how the latest national A&E figures, released this month, demonstrate “continued improvement” with 50.6 percent of seriously ill patients treated within four hours in January 2024, compared to 32.2 percent in January 2023.
And in news on EPRs, the president of the Committee for Health & Social Care in Guernsey has announced the delay of the first phase of the island’s EPR implementation to 2025, on the grounds of patient safety.
