New Nottingham CDIO bridging the digital maturity gap in familiar territory

One of the biggest challenges facing the NHS is lifting the least digitally mature hospital trusts, particularly the two to three dozen that still lack a full electronic patient record (EPR) system. Andy Callow already has experience overseeing the journey of one such trust, and is currently getting to grips with another.

Callow became chief digital information officer (CDIO) of Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH) in January and told Digital Health they expected to start a 12-week assessment process to choose an EPR provider in September or October.

“We are still in the process of going through the frontline digitalisation full business case plan,” said Callow, a former group CDIO at Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust.

“We have contracts nerve center and other providers, and we anticipate that by the end of this fiscal year — sometime in January or February — we’ll have a sense of what our funding is.”

The government has reiterated that fully featured electronic patient records should be rolled out to 90% of trusts by December 2023 and 100% of trusts by March 2025 so that NHS staff can quickly access all relevant patient information.

NUH successfully launched its Electronic Prescribing and Medicine Administration (EPMA) system on the NerveCenter system at its city hospital campus over the weekend of May 13-14, processing 62,000 prescriptions within the first week and 39,000 patients during the same period Identification wristbands were issued. , Callow said.

He added: “We managed to transcribe all the medication charts during the weekend until Monday.”

The EPMA is expected to go live at the trust’s other hospital, Queen’s Medical Center (QMC), on June 10-11, despite a strike by junior doctors scheduled for that week.

integration of clinical systems

The NUH has an even more fragmented digital structure than Kettering and Northampton, Callow said, noting that there are 414 different clinical systems in use in Nottingham compared to around 300 in Kettering and Northampton.

“This is manifested in the daily frustration of people who need five different diagnostic applications at a given time during clinics,” he said. “At NUH, we’re trying to work toward consolidating as many systems as possible.”

As part of that process, Callow said it is in the process of running workshops for employees to develop a digital strategy paper during the year, which it may present to the trust board in December.

At Kettering and Northampton General, a similar process has led to a 30% reduction in the number of diagnostic systems, although some digital systems are used only by specific clinical specialties.

The approach currently involves defining the strategic intent of each operating system and determining whether it is consolidated into a new system, as well as deciding which individual systems should link to the core patient record. and which will be imported into the Trust Data Warehouse.

When it comes to working on data warehouses, healthcare’s proposed Federated Data Platform (FDP) has the potential to play a role in the reckoning of trusts catching up in terms of digital maturity, especially given the severe financial constraints Under which all trust to find themselves.

Callow said, “The FDP is really interesting, but it is not without controversy.” “We are trying to understand what functionality it will provide and if there is an opportunity to save money once it is funded nationally.”

Kettering and Northampton are currently carrying out major work on their data warehouses, he said, and it is still unclear whether the trusts will have to continue doing such work themselves or look to the FDP to do so.