The Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital Trust (RNOH) and University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH) have announced their upcoming collaboration on Epic’s EHR, which is expected to be rolled-out at RNOH in November of 2025.
The roll-out, which follows funding approval from NHS England, will see Epic implemented across all three of RNOH’s sites, including its main hospital campus in Stanmore, the Bolsover Street Outpatient Assessment Centre, and the Enfield Musculoskeletal Community Health Hub.
According to a LinkedIn post sharing RNOH’s “delight” to be partnering with UCLH on the project, the focus will be on a new Epic Connect model “to implement an extension of UCLH’s Epic electronic health record”.
UCLH and RNOH’s collaboration will focus on a sharing of learning, with the new implementation being able to draw on UCLH’s “expertise in designing, implementing, and using Epic since March 2019”.
Speaking of his excitement at implementing an EHR at Royal National Orthopaedic and leveraging its capabilities to “improve care for patients”, the trust’s chief executive, Professor Paul Fish, said that “working in partnership with UCLH and being able to draw on their knowledge and experience of using Epic will set us up for success long into the future”.
David Probert, chief executive at UCLH, commented that “it is good to see NHS organisations work together in this way to learn from each other”, adding that the collaboration will “further improve how we work together across specialties to benefit patient care, for example in the London Sarcoma Service”.
The collaboration is set to begin later this month.
Digital transformation in the London region
In August, we highlighted some of the key findings from the South London Listens initiative around digital in work with local communities to improve access, including the “change movement” inspired by continued engagement with the local community, and how this has impacted on health inequalities.
The same month, we reported that North West London Integrated Care System had started to publish monthly summaries identifying involvement with local residents and communities, including data on digital reach and health survey responses from the month of June.
Into September, we shared the news of a planned procurement from North London Mental Health Partnership, seeking a digital local risk management and incident reporting system, and with interested suppliers requested to complete a questionnaire by 18 September.
There was also news on innovation from the region, including an announcement from DigitalHealth.London that a total of 17 SMEs had been selected as the latest cohort for its accelerator programme to develop digital solutions or services deemed to have the “highest potential to meet London’s NHS and social care challenges” in areas including AI, remote monitoring and mental health.
Focus on electronic health records
Looking to developments in terms of electronic health records, in the middle of August we highlighted the news that East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust had announced the selection of an electronic patient record across its four sites, with Dedalus’s cloud-ready system ORBIS U chosen for deployment.
There was news in August also from Jersey, where the Gouvèrnément d’Jèrr (Government of Jersey) Health and Community Services shared the 2024 annual report for quarter two, providing an overview of the department’s improvement plans and performance reporting for the year in key areas including its electronic patient records programme, e-referrals, e-prescribing, and progress on waiting times and its elective care list.
