North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust (NWAFT) has reportedly received confirmation of funding for a new EPR system, allowing work to move ahead on an outline business case, with a target date for implementation of 2029.
In its latest meeting, the trust board welcomed the news as a “significant and essential milestone” in improving patient care and safety, staff experience, and digital innovation. The EPR outline business case is now being revised with the aim of securing approval by the end of 2026, and the ultimate ambition of procuring and implementing a new system by 2029, it reports.
The trust’s newly published estates strategy highlights the challenges of not having an EPR in place, pointing to reliance on multiple systems that “do not integrate with each other”, and impacts seen in wasted clinical time, reduced efficiency, and introduced risk of patient harm. It also recognises the requirements for the trust estate’s electrical infrastructure to be robust enough to support uptime of the system, suggesting further investment is needed at department and clinical level.
Elsewhere, NWAFT records having “significantly strengthened” its clinical safety position over the last year, with formal safety documentation in place for a priority subset of trust clinical systems. A review identified more than 500 potential hazards and recommended over 340 additional safeguards, it continues, offering a consolidated view of digital clinical risk for the first time.
Three years’ worth of reported incidents have been analysed to get a better picture of where digital systems contribute to patient safety risk, according to the trust, and to identify those where information existed somewhere within the trust but did not reach the right place at the right time. These incidents account for around nine percent of those recorded, it states.
Initial implementation of federated data platform tools has been completed, with the Optica discharge planning and referral to treatment validation modules both now live. Work is ongoing to implement the health decision suite, a core set of data management and analytics tools, and a cyber security roadmap is being revised. A focus is now on preparing data and systems for future EPR implementation, it adds.
The board review of a proposed digital roadmap to 2031 resulted in discussions about the benefits of digital solutions such as ambient voice technology, but “highlighted the need for clearer prioritisation of digital initiatives and greater assurance regarding funding, workforce capacity, programme dependencies and alignment with the future EPR programme prior to final approval”.
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.
A revised programme plan has been prepared by George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust, following a decision to delay the go-live of its EPR from October 2026 to August 2027. According to the most recent update, a “failure of the M3 Validate Gateway” resulted in the re-planning exercise to inform a revised go-live date of 14 August 2027. “The re-planning exercise has been completed with all key stakeholders, based on the technical critical path, to establish a deliverable plan that mitigates the significant risks with the 2026 timeline,” the GEH board states. “The programme re-plan costs will be subject to a more detailed review, with the supplier costs reviewed through commercial discussions, and the internal programme costs to undergo further scrutiny.”
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.
