A Kent Trust has elevated its ambitions for digital maturity, deploying Allscripts' Sunrise EPR to facilitate joined up care.
Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust has deployed Sunrise EPR across the emergency departments at both its hospitals, as well as paediatric inpatient services, gastroenterology and neurology outpatients, and ordering tests and making referrals trust wide. Despite only being a few weeks in, the Trust is already experiencing impressive clinical benefits. “The new system has provided functionality that enables our teams to seamlessly share patient data, supporting the further development of a shared care record for Kent,” commented Jane Saunders, EPR director at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust.
The Trust selected Allscripts as its EPR provider in 2019 and the recent go-live marks a big step forward for the Trust’s digital maturity, helping to fulfil its ‘digital first, paper second’ strategy.
The early clinical benefits for the Trust have been notable, improving and digitising previously manual, time-consuming processes. Jane added that “just two weeks in, 1,200 daily users were able to deliver 30,000 tests and 170,000 results into the system. Labelling, that had previously been completed manually, has now been automated, saving hospital staff eight hours per day processing pathology forms. As a result, our clinicians have been able to spend more time with patients and have better visibility of each patient’s care pathway as all their information is recorded and stored within the EPR.”
“In the Emergency Department, workflows are being transformed. Previously, clinicians would be walking around to manually track patients, or to review notes from junior doctors,” Sue Forsey, director of IT, added. “Now, all processes are stored in Sunrise, so notes can be reviewed or exchanged without having to take the trip down to ED. The tab functionality within Sunrise also allows our clinical teams to use the EPR to easily access other applications acting as a portal so they have the right information, in the right place, when they need it. Our patients will experience less repetition too as all clinicians in their care pathway will have greater visibility of their needs.”
The Trust has more plans, including regional ambitions, that the go-live has the potential to unlock.
Jane said: “The next step for the Trust is to deploy Sunrise across all inpatient adult wards for core clinical documents before rolling out ePMA within 2021/22. We’re keen to see what else we can digitise, so we can support the continued integration of the Kent and Medway Shared Care Record."
