The EPR will give health and care staff instant and secure access to the information they need.
It will provide real time information when it is needed, where it is needed. It will enable faster, more personalised care by enabling quicker access to patient information. It will reduce the chance of human error by providing a more joined up, up to date record.
However, EPR is not about technology. It is about what changes when the information is there.
With our EPR, when a ward nurse documents information, it is immediately available to the next clinician who needs it – without the need to track down and thumb through thick paper files or move between multiple systems. When an A&E team sees a patient who has visited previously, they see the full picture of what happened before. When a bed manager needs to know if a patient may be ready to go home later in the day, it is on screen, not on a whiteboard that has to be updated by hand.
The EPR makes those things possible by putting and keeping information in one place.
For patients, this means the teams treating them spend less time finding information and more time using it. It means the same information is available across all three sites. It means they are less likely to be asked the same questions repeatedly.
For staff, this means working with accurate, up-to-date information at the point of care – with decision support built-in to prompt when something is due and flag when something needs attention.
These full benefits of our EPR will not be felt overnight. At go-live, the focus is on our new ways of working and settling into the system. Understanding how information moves between teams and sites will happen over the weeks and months that follow. The shift to genuinely shared-record thinking will gradually become the norm.
For patients, this means the teams treating them spend less time finding information and more time using it.
Accurate, up-to-date information at the point of care.