The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust (RWT) has signed a 10-year contract with System C for an integrated electronic patient record (EPR) system, which will replace the trust’s in-house built EPR and accelerate its digital maturity and roadmap.
RWT, which is one of the largest acute and community providers in the West Midlands, will take a two-step approach to the roll out.
The first phase will see the trust’s legacy patient administration system (PAS), emergency department (ED) and theatre systems replaced, before the remainder of the EPR’s clinical functionality is rolled out in the second phase.
The project will start in November and complete with the PAS, ED and theatres functionality in 2025 – ahead of NHS England’s target for every trust in England to have an EPR.
Nick Bruce, Group Director of Digital Technology at The Royal Wolverhampton and Walsall Healthcare NHS Trusts, said: “Anyone who has been faced with the challenge of procuring a new EPR as part of a digital transformation programme will appreciate the amount of work involved to get us to this point.
“It’s now reassuring for us to be on the starting line of a major deployment with a credible partner that has a proven track record of delivering high class enterprise-wide systems fit for the future.
“We’ve had our current PAS for over 20 years, so we want to undertake a phased approach to acknowledge the level of transformation involved and ensure our staff feel comfortable with the scale of change needed.
“Once live, the EPR will allow clinical teams to see a single view of a person’s entire clinical record, which means our staff can have access to the right information, in the right place, at the right time.”
By deploying the latest iteration of System C’s CareFlow EPR, the trust will modernise the delivery of electronic patient notes across services and integrate all aspects of the care pathway such as order comms, test resulting and electronic prescribing, including medicines administration.
Once the new system is live, RWT will enhance integration with its partner trust, Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust, which also uses System C’s EPR.
The move aligns with the trust’s convergence strategy, aimed at optimising patient care through the seamless integration of digital patient platforms across the local area.
Leveraging consistent software and information across both trusts will enable health and care professionals to make more informed decisions and ensure better continuity of care for patients.
The new system will also integrate with other services that System C provides across the wider Black Country Integrated Care System, offering not only alignment in technologies, but also a highly accessible and scalable solution for the entire system.
Professor David Loughton, Group CEO of Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust said: “This is a very exciting development for the trust as we accelerate our digital transformation. Like any major investment, it’s driven by improving the quality of our care and outcomes for our patients.
“We already have a strong working relationship with System C, and this new EPR will play a key role in supporting our staff to deliver high-quality, joined-up care for our patients.
“It’s also incredibly useful that this system will integrate with other technologies across our local health and care system, ultimately enabling us to create one fully informed, single patient record.”
Nick Wilson, CEO of System C, added: “I’m pleased we can continue the longstanding partnership we’ve had with RWT since 2010.
“We’re proud that System C’s EPR has been chosen to fully support the trust’s requirements to deliver services within an integrated model and join up the digital approach it has with Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust.
“It means the two trusts will be able to work more effectively with each other, and others in their patch, and deliver against the ambitions of integrated care.”
