King’s College Hospital and Guy’s and St Thomas’ have reported savings of £4.1 million from their combined use of the Epic EPR system.
The trusts point to the avoidance of 3.3 million duplicate or repeat tests, saving up to 275,000 hours of nursing and phlebotomy time since 2023. This has been supported by the system automatically cancelling duplicate blood test orders placed within one hour of each other, the trust notes.
Automated alerts generated when clinicians order repeat tests sooner than recommended by national and Royal College guidelines, are credited with preventing 384,000 tests and saving £3.6 million. Similar alerts on blood transfusion orders have also saved the trusts. The same approach will now be applied across imaging, with hopes of similarly helping to avoid repeated scans.
“Every test we can safely avoid matters,” says Susan Robinson, clinical lead for pathology at Guy’s and St Thomas’. “A repeat test ordered too soon is unlikely to change how we manage a patient, but skipping it spares them a blood draw, frees up more time for our nurses and the lab, and saves money.”
The system first went live at Guy’s and St Thomas’ in October 2023, with the trust sharing the EPR programme moving to the benefits realisation stage in October 2025. At that time, it highlighted optimisation of pathology demand and the retirement of legacy systems as two areas driving savings, but stated that “while cumulative savings had been achieved, they remained below target”.
Guy’s and St Thomas’ also stated that the system 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.
Wider trend: EPR
HTN was joined by a fantastic panel including Shanker Vijayadeva, GP lead – digital transformation at NHS England (London region); Rosie Gilbert, head of digital programmes at Sherwood Forest Hospitals; Tom Stocker, CHIO and EPR advisor; and Jatinder Punia, director of sales at Nervecentre, to discuss the future of EPRs. Our panel considered the road ahead in the short, medium, and long term; the potential for AI, AVT, and automation; emerging opportunities; and practical realities of EPR programmes on the ground.
The Committee for Health and Social Care in Guernsey has shared updates on its EPR programme, highlighting outcomes from phase one and a decision to “transition towards closure” in favour of a rolling programme of improvement. “These are difficult updates, but it is important that the Committee is transparent with the community about how these capital programmes have developed since their inception,” George Oswald, president of the Committee for Health & Social Care, said of both the EPR and Hospital Modernisation programme. “We recognised the problems with these programmes of work and foresaw the difficulties that would come with trying to push ahead regardless. Now, we have made what I consider to be the entirely appropriate decision to stop.”
Airedale NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with its new Oracle Health Millennium EPR. The go-live took place across 17 and 18 October, with final checks and staff training forming part of the preparations. A leaflet shared with patients to inform them of the upcoming transition acknowledged that some small delays in recording notes are to be expected as staff adjust to the new system, but that overall the change will mean needing to repeat information less often.
