May 2023 Blog
Sam Higginson, EPR Programme Senior Responsible Officer
Hello everybody! Welcome to my first EPR blog. As SRO for the 3-acute hospital EPR programme, I have been heavily involved in EPR discussions. It’s no secret that we have been wanting to advance our digital maturity as a health and care system across Norfolk and Waveney for a very long time. 
And now I’m really excited that we are in a real position to make this happen. The EPR is our biggest digital programme to date and is a key enabler of our transformation strategies for Acute Clinical Services across all sites.
The EPR is a digital tool which will essentially replace paper-based patient records over time. As someone with an overarching view of acute hospital activity, the prospect of having an EPR is very exciting and will bring many benefits to our patients and staff.
Earlier this year we were excited to hear our Outline Business case for our EPR was approved and as you will know, we are now in the next phase of the programme as we move through procurement to secure the best supplier for our EPR needs.
From my perspective, the most valuable and key improvements the EPR will bring to our hospitals is better, safe care for patients. The EPR will allow greater clinical information sharing with health and care partners across the system including primary care, community care and mental health providers. This means that as a patient, people can expect that their important health and care information will be considered by those taking of care of them, in a holistic way. As a member of staff caring for someone, understanding the whole picture of their health is incredibly important so that we can provide the best care possible.
The EPR will also help streamline and improve administration as notes and important paperwork such as referrals, will be completed digitally which is easy for staff in different departments or in other hospitals to find and process.
I am also particularly interested in the performance and activity insights the EPR will show. Having up-to-date, accurate information about service usage will be vital to help ensure our hospitals deliver care for the people when and where they need it the most. The information the EPR unlocks will help us identify what we’re doing well and discover opportunities to make improvements.
Over the coming months, for patients of our acute hospitals, there won’t be an impact of the EPR Programme whilst the procurement and scoping work takes place to lead us to the implementation phase. For staff however, there will be many opportunities to take part in sharing your views of current systems and your hopes for the EPR. We’ll be recruiting for various roles in the EPR implementation teams too so look out for invitations to play a real part in implementation.
This is the start of a very important journey for all of us and I, along with the EPR team, thank you for your support on this big programme of work and look forward to working with some of you more closely on this.