The Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust (GST) Epic EHR programme has moved into a benefits realisation stage, with the board noting key updates on impact, benefits, and future plans.
The trust shares a progress update stating that “while cumulative savings had been achieved, they remained below target”. Continued monitoring is underway to help ensure the system “delivers the savings anticipated in the original business case”, the trust reports. Of the savings that have been made, GST highlights the optimisation of pathology demand and the retirement of legacy systems as two contributing areas. In particular, collaborative work on pathology demand optimisation with King’s College Hospital is listed as “ahead of plan” and “set to be published as an exemplar in the global Epic community”.
GST states that the system has already had a “transformative impact” on patient care and cross-organisational collaboration, with more than 750,000 patients registered through the MyChart patient portal able to access health information, test results, and appointment details. “To date, more than 5.3 million test results have been delivered via MyChart, and patients registered with the portal are half as likely to miss appointments compared to the trust average, helping reduce unused clinic slots,” the trust commented. Also noted were improvements in patient administration and the benefits in helping to reduce the risk of delays to patient care.
The trust adds that work is also underway on the integration between MyChart and the NHS App, and between Epic and the EMIS system in primary care, with the aim of improving care coordination, safety, and population health management.
Elsewhere, GST reports on further work to be done as part of its antimicrobial stewardship programme. Though organisational-level data is now available thanks to interfacing with a third-party vendor, it highlights a lack of adequate reporting systems “within or from Epic” to allow for the monitoring of antimicrobial consumption across the organisation. “This limited intelligence on our consumption patterns means that adverse trends or performance levels are extremely difficult to identify, and opportunities to drive improvement are missing,” it states. “This is a particular concern for management of complex patients with resistant organisms and for monitoring of restricted agent use.” The trust is now working with Epic on developing systems within the Epic solution to make this data available.
In terms of a wider digital update, GST also offers an insight into digital transformation efforts, summarising: “Notable achievements include improvements in genomics platforms, patient access tools such as MyChart that had seen 48 percent outpatient adoption, and the use of generative AI. Challenges remained in infrastructure modernisation and data quality.”
Wider trend: Digital transformation
Medway NHS Foundation Trust has outlined a business case for a full virtual hospital with 260 virtual beds, aiming to free-up 91 inpatient beds, close of up to three wards, and position MFT as “a leading site for ICS-wide scaling of digitally enabled acute care”. Highlighting a “serious efficiency bottleneck” and “sustained and systemic” challenges in managing flow, discharge, and capacity; the trust states: “MFT currently manages a large proportion of patients in high-cost physical settings who could be cared for more safely, more appropriately, and more affordably through virtual or digitally enabled models.”
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