NHSE scraps £69m hospital bed management programme

Focusing instead on EPR rollout

NHS England (NHSE), the body responsible for commissioning for the NHS in England, has scrapped a £69 million project aimed at reducing waiting lists and freeing up hospital beds.

The electronic bed and capacity management systems (eBCMS) programme was based on a successful trial at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust. The trust developed an informatics system including a command centre to manage bed allocation and real-time location tracking of patients to allow granular management of patient flows from admissions to discharge and transfers.

NHSE claimed that Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells achieved a 45% reduction in patient transfer times saving 2,258 hours of nursing time monthly.

A £69 million programme to expand the system to the 16 worst performing trusts for A&E waiting lists was approved in 2023.

Among the technology vendors involved in developing the system were platform provider DNV Imatis and TeleTracking, which provides health informatics and operations systems.

Despite its apparent successes, the programme to expand it has been axed as NHSE focuses on rolling out electronic patient records (EPR) to all trusts March 2026, according to Health Service Journal.

A spokesperson for NHSE said: “After initial exploratory work, eBCMS were not rolled out nationally and the NHS instead prioritised supporting all trusts to reach a core level of digitisation and put EPR systems in place, which increasingly offer bed and capacity management functionality.”

EPR systems, as implemented by some vendors, may be able to replicate some of the functionality of eBCMS but they are fundamentally different systems, with EPR centred on outcomes for individual patients and eBCMS used to manage medical facilities. Moreover, EPR is used primarily by clinicians to manage for patient care, while eBCMS is used by operational teams and hospital administrators for managing capacity.

The NHS will understandably wish to avoid duplicating efforts, but a tech industry source told HSJ that scrapping eBCMS represents a wasted opportunity to modernise operational technology in the health service as part of the NHS’s 10-year health plan.

“An important feature of the well-developed eBCMS programme was to introduce the level of granular logistical capability and automation that is necessary to drive patient flow improvement, make better use of hospital capacity, and which clinical EPRs typically do not provide," the source said.

Last year NHSE, which itself is being abolished by the current government scrapped a £300 million project aimed at modernising GP services.