Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, a health system based in the south of England, went live with Allscripts Sunrise electronic patient record five months after signing the contract in May.
Initially, the trust planned to deploy the patient record system in the summer of 2020, but accelerated the deployment to support staff during the high-demand winter months. Two of the trust's wards went live with seven nursing documentation and risk assessments in November, and 22 additional wards went live two weeks later.
Chief Digital and Information Officer Mary Hutchinson attributed the fast turnaround to having access to an Allscripts-developed blueprint. She also reported a positive response from clinicians during the training and testing period. To begin the year, the trust was level 1 on the HIMSS EMRAM digital maturity model, and it aims to achieve level 6 within two years.
The trust has also deployed a clinical wrap strategy, which wraps the new technology for clinical functionality around its existing third-party patient administration system. More than 300 clinicians, including healthcare assistants and consultants, participated in the development, documentation and testing of the new technology.
The trust has a 24-hour EPR support team to help nursing staff, and dedicated command center coordinates efforts. Prior to going live on Sunrise EPR, the nurses had to travel up and down a 10-story tower block to collect patient information on paper. When the first two wards launched Sunrise, a ward manager removed all the paper forms, which created a pile more than a meter high.
Due to the initial rollout's success at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital, the trust aims to move up the next rollout of the EPR at Cheltenham General Hospital to February 2020.