Bolton NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with Sunrise Acute Care following one of the most-extensive initial deployments for the Allscripts electronic patient record in the UK.
The trust went live in A&E and across all of the wards at the Royal Bolton Hospital at the start of October, using a pathway approach.
This meant that once patients were registered on the system, they continued to have their information recorded electronically to avoid a mix of paper and electronic working.
“After months of planning, it was fabulous to be able to celebrate a successful go-live and a significant step in our digital transformation journey,” said Bolton’s chief information officer, Phillipa Winter.
“The implementation has been a testament to the partnership, commitment and teamwork of the trust, its suppliers, and their implementation teams.
“The new system has been enthusiastically received by staff and a high proportion of our patients are now having all their details recorded on the EPR.”
The trust is using a ‘clinical wrap’ deployment model, which is a non-disruptive approach to implementing an EPR. This means it has retained its third-party patient administration system and is ‘wrapping’ Sunrise Acute Care clinical functionality around it.
As a result of the go-live, Bolton’s emergency department is using Sunrise for electronic prescribing and order communications, and its wards are live with e-prescribing, order communications, clinical documentation, and Sunrise Mobile.
Winter said: “We chose to make sure the implementation supported our care pathways, which require a wide range of functionality and documentation.
“The immediate benefit is that, for patients who now have an electronic patient record, our staff have a clearer, more-easily-accessible overview of their treatment and care.
“There is also minimal duplication of information, which saves time for staff and for patients who don’t have to provide their details several times.”
The trust has also gone live with a ‘first of its type’ interface between Sunrise and the pharmacy system, supplied by EMIS Health, which will enable it to introduce ‘closed loop’ e-prescribing and medicines administration.
‘Closed loop’ systems are required by the highest levels of the HIMSS EMRAM maturity model and, in the case of EPMA, mean that the whole process of prescribing, dispensing and administering a drug is done electronically.
The trust has also introduced foundational elements of Allscripts Electronic Document Management Solution, which will support business continuity planning. And, in the next phase, will enable clinicians to access information during any scheduled or non-scheduled downtime.
It will also enable information that is still captured on paper to be displayed in Sunrise.
For example, the trust is planning to capture ambulance notes and make them available to staff in A&E.
Richard Strong, managing director at Allscripts, said: “This go-live was not only a ‘big bang’ implementation, but one of the largest scopes for an initial deployment of Sunrise Acute Care that we have seen in an NHS trust.
“Naturally, this has meant that the past few weeks have been extremely busy, but the trust’s operations team has been phenomenal in managing the introduction of the EPR and in working with us to keep perceptions positive and adoption high.
“Bolton’s success is also an endorsement of the clinical wrap approach that we are seeing adopted by an increasing number of UK trusts, and we look forward to working with the trust on the next phases of its digital journey.”
