Lincolnshire Community and Hospitals NHS Group has put forward its suggested timeline for a three-phase delivery of its EPR, with the first two phases to be delivered by April 2027.
Elements of the programme have been rescheduled to prevent clashes with urgent and emergency care components during peak winter pressures, according to the board, who also stress that the programme is currently in a “critical phase”. Strong engagement and focus from operational teams and end users is required, it continues, with further workflows to be designed, gaps in the organisational development model being “urgently addressed”, and oversight of the programme to increase from this month forward.
Currently, the EPR programme is to go ahead in three phases: phase one covering front door systems, patient safety bundle, bed and flow management, and investigations to go live in October 2026; 
and phase two covering electronic prescribing, investigations read and interact, inpatient paperless, and infection prevention control to go live in April 2027, pending confirmation from Nervecentre. Phase three will be “more complex due to patient services hub integration”, the board notes, incorporating PAS, theatres, patient engagement elements, outpatient clinical, and final elements on interfaces with other systems.
The finance and performance committee voices concerns about challenges arising during the delivery of both the EPR and electronic document management system programmes, pointing to “potential to overspend the resource available/projected through the original business case”. A review is underway of delivery objectives, timescales, and required resource, it adds. The board also highlight findings from an August 2025 cyber compliance report which outlined risks relating to unsupported and legacy systems across the group, and recognised the EPR and EDMS would “significantly reduce the number of systems”.
In a meeting earlier this year, the board updated on digital work stream progress and remaining group development programme milestones, recognising “good progress” but “slippage on agreed timescales for some actions”. It reported that digital initiatives including the EDMS and virtual consultations are enabling the reduction of physical records and promoting remote care pathways.
Wider trend: EPR
Judy Faulkner, Epic founder and CEO, has shared insights into Epic’s almost 50-year journey in the electronic health records space, in a YouTube interview with journalist and author Katie Couric. Beginning by talking about her background and her discovery of coding in the early days of the computer, Faulkner shares the story of being asked to develop a system capable of tracking patient clinical information over time as part of an assignment, and how being one of the only women in that space at the time ended up being an advantage.
Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust has awarded a ten-year EPR contract with a value of £52 million to Epic, taking the trust up to 2036. The trust’s board in its January meeting covered the board assurance framework, noting issues with IT infrastructure, digital maturity, and technical debt. “Lewisham and Greenwich NHS has had a phased roll out over several years of its existing EPR system which has left the trust with a partially deployed EPR for acute services and a separate community EPR with only 80 percent of our clinical systems integrated and linked to the Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Patient Master Index,” it stated.
East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust has shared the first successful go-live for its EmPoweR EPR programme, as the trust outlines its plans for strengthening digital foundations under its five-year integrated delivery plan. Successful completion of the trust’s first EmPoweR EPR go-live has included the migration of the Nervecentre clinical system used to track patient flow, to a cloud-based SaaS platform to promote faster updates to EPR, it shares, with learnings from this phase to inform the next major go-live in September 2026. A paper picnic has offered insight into clinical documentation still in use across services, forming an “important foundation” for EPR preparation, it continues, highlighting current workflows and opportunities to streamline or transition to digital solutions.
