- Mid and South Essex ICS plans to implement EPR across main providers by 2025
An integrated care system is planning on launching what it believes is the ‘first’ single electronic patient record across acute, mental health and community providers.
Mid and South Essex ICS is hoping to have a joint EPR system across its main providers in place by March 2025, its board papers show. However, the papers added the final timeline for deployment was still to be confirmed, as this was subject to approval and supplier choice.
It said it plans to spend £36m on the project involving Mid and South Essex Foundation Trust and Essex Partnership University Trust – the acute trust and mental health and community trust respectively within the ICS’s geography – with £27m funded by the Department of Health and Social Care. However, the ICB has since said these figures are provisional.
NHS England told ICSs to come up with plans for a single or “converged” patient record system last year.
A number of acute trusts within systems have been exploring moving to a single EPR, including in Cheshire and Merseyside and Norfolk. Neighbouring Devon and Cornwall ICS were looking to set up a joint EPR across their acute trusts, although one of them has now called this unlikely.
However, Mid and South Essex ICS is believed to be the first to plan an EPR across all of its health providers, regardless of sector.
A document presented to its May board said: “There are many areas across the MSE ICS where our residents have overlapping needs across acute, mental health and community care – yet our systems are not setup to manage this effectively.”
It said it wanted to address this by building an integrated health care solution infrastructure “for the first time” in the UK.
The document said: “Our system currently relies on an ‘unintegrated’ digital health infrastructure with over 10 siloed clinical systems.” It added MSEFT had three EPR systems, while EPUT had seven.
The paper continued: “Lack of EPR integration prevents staff from having an overall picture of the patient’s clinical journey and consistent access to viewing patient records and notes. This leads to gaps in the patient’s clinical pathway and poses risks.”
It added: “There is no system in the UK market that currently delivers the functionality required across all care settings. MSEFT and EPUT would be ‘first movers’ in this space.”
The plan was presented as part of the ICS’s joint forward plan, which was labelled as draft. The paper said the business case was going through DHSC governance and it hoped to have full business case approval by the end of the financial year.
HSJ asked if the draft plan had now been approved and whether the outline business case has now been approved.
Update 15:14pm 14 June - The ICB has told HSJ the £36m spend figure and £27m DHSC funding figure are provisional figures. HSJ has amended the story to reflect this.
12:35pm 14 June - Since this article was first published, the ICB has been in touch to say the draft document in its board papers (which this article was based on) is now out of date and has said it will be providing a response to clarify specifically which parts have been superseded. HSJ will update this article as needed once that information is provided.
HSJ made multiple attempts to clarify details with the ICB before publication to ensure the article’s accuracy.
Source Date
18 May 2023
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