Yeovil District Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has received £3.7m in government funding to implement InterSystems’ electronic patient record system.
TrakCare will be rolled out across the trust over the next two years.
EPR programme manager Carole Shuff could not reveal the value of the eight-year contract with InterSystems, but confirmed that the trust received £3.7m in central funding for the project.
This has allowed it to move forward faster with its plans for an integrated EPR.
Yeovil worked with Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust to procure a new system. The group, known as SmartCare, announced last May it had chosen InterSystems as its supplier.
It is one of six collaborations of southern trusts that received little or nothing from the National Programme for IT and have together attracted £80 million in central funding for implementing new technologies.
Yeovil uses a number of legacy HP systems and will start by replacing the patient administration system, maternity and A&E systems.
Nurses as well as doctors, pharmacists, physiotherapists and specialists use the observations system on mobile devices. The trust has a ‘bring your own device’ policy and has distributed 400-500 iPads to staff.
Yeovil is one of 29 vanguard areas of England funded to trial new models of integrated care. A trust spokesman said the introduction of TrakCare will help it break down organisational boundaries and enable better communication both within and outside of the trust.
Shuff said:
“We have been running workshops to get familiar with the product and understand what the opportunities are to improve our ways of working. We are also starting data migration and moving towards testing and training in the months to come.”