The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust has shared updates on phase one go-live of its EPR programme and a revised EPR milestone plan to the end of 2026 and beyond.
Phase one covered the replacement of the trust’s patient administration system for acute and community services, as well as the emergency department patient first system and theatre management system.
The transition to the Careflow platform took place over the weekend from Friday 26 to Sunday 28 September, with the PAS being set to “view only” from the Friday evening and all PAS-related processes temporarily managed on paper. This gave teams the time to complete a “complex” data migration process involving the extraction of data from the system, and then upload that data to the new one. After fit-for-purpose testing took place, new data generated over the weekend and held on paper was rekeyed into the new system.
Although most parts of the transition were delivered on time, Royal Wolverhampton notes that there was a delay due to the complexity of emergency department data. “To maintain patient safety, a decision was made at 8:30am to pause the go-live and relaunch the system with a ‘clean slate’ at mid-day,” it shares. “This allowed for a live, incremental transition: new patients were added to Careflow, while in-flight patients continued to be managed on MSS Patient First until discharge.”
Reflecting on the go-live, the trust notes that operationally, processes moved at a slower pace, “largely due to staff familiarising themselves with the new system”, but adds that aside from planned reductions in activity levels to support the launch, no patient activity was lost. The programme team worked on issues as they were identified, including around access to the trust e-discharge system, and integration challenges with downstream systems.
Royal Wolverhampton highlights having put on additional training sessions to familiarise staff with the system and new processes. “A particular area of focus is outpatients, and the programme team are activity working with the information team to develop operational reports (such as the PTL) to allow patients to be booked,” it says. Technical areas are being worked on, where users can be locked out after a single failed login attempt, issues with e-discharge letters, and a number of areas such as waiting lists that require validation.
The board presents a summary: “During the weekend of 27/28th September over 70million items of data were successfully transferred from existing systems to the new Careflow systems. Whilst there have been challenges post implementation, no patient safety concerns have been raised. Staff from across the group and specifically RWT have worked incredibly hard to ensure that go-live and subsequent embedding of the system has gone well, team work and responsiveness from system partners, staff in technical IT and operational teams have pulled together to ensure that there have been no critical incidents or significant impact for patients.”
Looking ahead to 2026, Royal Wolverhampton sets out a roadmap, looking to conduct a post implementation review in March, to introduce CAS cards in ED from April, and to complete clinical EPR for inpatients by December.
Wider trend: EPR
A recent HTN Now panel discussion explored EPR customisations for the frontline and how digital transformation can support the direction set in the 10 Year Health Plan. We discussed optimisation, challenges and key learnings from success stories shared by our experts. Panellists included Doctor Stephen Jones, principal clinical psychologist at Sheffield Children’s Hospital; David Wong, associate professor of health data science and health informatics at Leeds University; Mark Simpson, digital innovation leader at Leeds Community Healthcare; and Michael Odling-Smee, CEO at Aire Innovate.
The board of York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has shared an update on progress around EPR implementation, next steps, and future focuses for digital. Overall progress is reported as “in line with plan”, with go-live of the first tranche due to begin on 27 February 2026, including observations, clinical documentation for inpatients, urgent & emergency care, electronic prescribing and medicine administration, and read-only diagnostic results. The second tranche, which contains full order comms, is set to go live on 30 June, 2026, with the third to follow on 30 October.
Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust has shared a revised digital roadmap with go-live set for January 2026 of its SystmOne EPR implementation, and an additional £1 million in programme costs. The implementation is continuing, with structured data cleansing, migration, and referral cleanup activities ongoing, according to the trust. The decision to defer the go-live to January is to allow the completion of both data readiness and staff training, it continues, with the projected cost also to rise from £3.5 to £4.46 million due to costs associated with training and manual data migration.
In November, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust shared updates and priority areas as its Connect EPR programme moves from the implementation to the stabilisation phase. On the priority areas for stabilisation the trust notes a focus on redesigning of clinics within Connect to improve patient bookings, ensuring no gaps in system design around workflows may hinder the delivery of patient care, and ensuring correspondence is “being completed and messaged in a timely way” with an initial focus on discharge summaries and clinical letters. Teams will be mobilised to support stabilisation across the organisation, and work will take place on key administrative pathways.
