Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust (CWPT) 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.
Whilst a contribution of £2.3 million from the ICB toward the costs for 2025/26 has been accepted, any additional delays or data migration issues risk impacting service continuity, with unfunded costs putting “further financial pressure on the recurrent underlying deficit”. Mitigations put in place to avoid this, CWPT states, cover strengthened programme governance, a phased approach to rollout, comprehensive staff training, and continued financial negotiations.
Data migration is being supported by NHSE Tiger Teams, but a request for 50 staff was declined, with CWPT now looking to internal options and the potential to combine this work with data quality improvements. A decision from Tiger Teams is being awaited for product configuration, which is currently listed as “under-resourced”, and delays here have added pressure for downstream testing and training activities. Smartcard-only authentication has been agreed for access management, with the rollout of cards, terminals, and RBAC mapping now “critical”, the trust notes, and further challenges here around capacity.
The board moves on to discuss ares of good practice for its ePMA programme, with ePMA now implemented across all mental health inpatient units. Rollout to other inpatient areas has been delayed to early 2026 due to complexities around integration with the EPR.
Community rollout of ePMA will require senior executive support, CWPT shares, with a review to be undertaken to ensure adequate staffing across pharmacy, digital, and data teams to deliver the system safely across the trust. “The use of ePMA is supporting an improvement in patient safety by reducing the levels of avoidable harm caused by unsafe use of medications,” it reports. “There has also been a reduction in the overall time taken to prescribe, check, supply and administer medicines. This reduction in time taken facilitates enhanced patient care as time saved gives clinicians more time to spend with patients.”
Elsewhere, CWPT updates on progress including its participation in the West Midlands Consortium for the procurement of ambient voice technology, and the launch of a new app that uses AI to help Talking Therapies patients access self-management tools and to support the service in receiving referrals “in a way that captures the voice of the patient”.
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.
Welsh Ambulance Services University NHS Trust (WAST) has shared that the refresh of its electronic patient care record application has been formally approved following “extensive collaboration” with users and stakeholders. The ePCR’s user interface is undergoing enhancement to make it more intuitive, with input from senior clinicians, digital services, and the trust’s CCIO. “The project has now progressed from the design phase to development,” the board shares.
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.
