The new University Hospitals Dorset NHS Foundation Trust has opened with a single electronic patient record (EPR) running live across its two acute sites.
It has developed Graphnet’s CareCentre software, already used by Poole Hospital, as the basis for the shared record with Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals.
The deployment involved migrating 34 million items of clinical data and about 40 interfaces from the legacy systems at Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals across to the Poole EPR.
Peter Gill, the new trust’s director of informatics, said: “This is a truly wonderful achievement and a fantastic starting position for our merged trust.
“I don’t know of any trust in the country that could claim they have merged their EPR in advance of organisational merge. It has been a fantastic collaborative effort all round.”
Range of data
Data fed into the EPR includes that from patient administration systems, pathology results, radiology reports, GP referral letters, A&E discharges, neurophysiology results, medical photography, cardio-respiratory results and clinic letters.
The system involves the use of over 100 structured electronic forms.
It can also be used to launch the Dorset Care Record, which is shared with local authorities in the county to bring together information on health and social care.
The two trusts were already using the One Dorset Pathology single laboratory information system.
Image by Daniel Sone, public domain via Wikimedia Commons
