Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has successfully gone live with System C’s EPR, part of a major technology investment designed to put the Trust at the forefront of digital excellence. 

Barnsley Hospital is one of the leading NHS Trusts in the country and cares for approximately 400,000 people each year.

Integrated functionality now live at the Trust includes patient administration and maternity, theatres, ED, clinical noting, care plans, care-co-ordination, alerting, referrals and e-observation systems.

The Trust is the first in the country to migrate away from the Lorenzo EPR, bought under the centralised National Programme for IT.  System C will be migrating a second Lorenzo site, Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust, to its EPR later this year. 

The whole deployment process was achieved remotely at Barnsley’s request due to the constraints imposed by lockdown and the need to assist with infection control. 

ICT Director's Perspective

Tom Davidson, ICT director at Barnsley Hospital, explained: 

"The challenges presented by the pandemic have spurred adoption of digital systems right across the healthcare sector, and we felt it was an excellent opportunity to build on that momentum. Initially, our project had a planned April go-live but it was put on hold while our ICT and Project teams were in the thick of providing support for the Trust’s response to Covid-19.  Once we were settled into a new way of working, we were able to reassure the senior team at the Trust that we were able to proceed, safely, and the time was right, so we rescheduled our go-live for early July. The training and support teams have been fantastic and have pulled out all the stops to support staff and ensure go-live was a success. System C were able to continue to provide project support to us remotely and we worked hard to achieve our ambitious goals to plan. This locally owned achievement will springboard our digital plans into the future with a great relationship with System C.”

Nursing Care Planning Functionality

Claire Grant, chief nursing information officer at Barnsley Hospital, added that the Trust and System C had worked particularly hard to build nursing care planning functionality within the EPR. 

"The whole ethos behind its development was to make each care plan truly bespoke to each patient, therefore ensuring maximum patient safety in terms of the nursing care delivered, while maintaining gold standard documentation.  We are fiercely proud of the resulting product and our nurses find the system intuitive and easy to use.  Although it is early days, we are already seeing the documentation/safety tool compliance benefits."

Upgrading to CareFlow EPR

This is the first time that a Lorenzo system has been upgraded to System C’s CareFlow EPR (formerly known as Medway).  This meant that the standard System C methodology had to be adapted in order to meet the specific characteristics of Lorenzo in areas such as data migration, reporting, interfacing and workflow.   The methodology was developed in parallel for Barnsley and Walsall and is now available for any other Trusts wishing to upgrade.

The remote deployment was made possible by extensive use of Microsoft Teams, as well as System C’s standard support platform.  Additional remote support was provided to the Trust’s own ‘super users’ and floorwalkers over the course of the weekend roll out to ED, acute medical units, maternity and inpatient wards.

Ian Denley, joint chief executive of System C, commented:

"There is a lot to do when replacing a system like Lorenzo for the first time, as we have to modify our deployment tools and processes and fill functional gaps.  It was made all the more difficult because of the conditions presented by Covid-19.  I am delighted how well the deployment has gone and would like to thank the Trust teams for their excellent performance."

Functionality integrated with CareFlow at Barnsley includes the System C theatres offering, developed by Bluespier.  The Bluespier theatre management software was already in use at the Trust but has now been integrated to allow for theatres scheduling and to help improve resource utilisation.  

Stuart van Rooyen, managing director at Bluespier, commented:

"This project is another solid example of seamless interoperability between Bluespier and System C and is set to have a hugely positive impact on overall workflows.  The tight integration between the EPR and the theatre system gives the Trust easier and transparent scheduling in theatres, real time utilisation capabilities to maximise theatre usage and a truly connected journey across the theatre pathway. We are delighted with the success of the project and particularly proud of the flexibility shown by the Trust, Bluespier and System C whilst delivering a go-live in difficult circumstances."

Next steps at Barnsley Hospital include the deployment of the Mediviewer document management system from IMMJ Systems.