Gloucestershire Hospitals walking on sunshine with Allscripts

Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has selected Allscripts to help develop an electronic patient record (EPR).

The trust will implement Allscripts’ Sunrise Acute Care which will integrate with and “clinically wrap around” its existing patient administration system (PAS) which is supplied by Intersystems.

This “wrap” around the PAS will allow Gloucestershire Hospitals to develop an EPR system.

Mark Hutchinson, the trust’s chief digital and information officer, said having this particular approach would allow the trust to work collaboratively with its suppliers to deliver new, digital services, starting with nursing documentation, paperless outpatients, order communications and e-prescribing.

Allscripts Sunrise has already been implemented at Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust (one of NHS England’s Global Digital Exemplars) and Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust.

Hutchinson said the system’s UK reference sites along with its flexibility and configurability had been key to his trust’s decision to deploy the system.

“When this trust started its digital journey, the promise was that it would have an EPR,” he said.

“Deploying Sunrise Acute Care will deliver on that promise, because the Allscripts clinical wrap approach allows you to get straight into improving the safety and quality of care, by improving processes and removing cumbersome, potentially unsafe paper.”

Another factor in the decision was Allscripts’ open architecture and the ease with which Sunrise can interoperate with other systems.

This will enable the Gloucestershire Hospitals to feed information into Gloucestershire’s JUYI (Joining Up Your Information) portal, and to give clinicians secure access to the information it holds via a tab in the EPR; in line with the national imperative to develop IT to support joined-up, integrated care.

Richard Strong, Allscripts UK managing director, said: “Implementing EPRs that are open and interoperable is critical to efficient sharing of information between Gloucestershire’s main hospitals.

“Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s decision to select the Sunrise solution will position the trust to communicate effectively, improve health outcomes and drive efficiencies.”