Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh Foundation NHS Trust picks Allscripts Sunrise ahead of TPP SystmOne

NHS Trust signs a five-year seven-figure deal with Trustmarque to implement its electronic medical record solution in a bid to cut costs and improve patient care

Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh (WWL) NHS Foundation Trust is working with IT services provider Trustmarque to implement the Allscripts Sunrise electronic medical record platform across all of its sites to cut costs and help clinicians work more efficiently.

Stephen Dobson, associate director of information and technology at WWL, told Computing that the trust wanted to get a high-end electronic patient record system that would enable it to use electronic prescribing and electronic documentation, among other features.

"The amount that trusts in the UK ask of our doctors and nurses is too much, [they have a lot] to remember, so we needed to build the right tools to augment their capabilities. We went out to procure these systems last year," he said.

The trust, which provides acute hospital services for a local population of over 318,000, signed a seven-figure deal with Trustmarque in October 2014 to deploy the Allscripts platform after a competitive tender process.

"We went through a framework in which there are different suppliers who are paired with certain products. Trustmarque happened to be the one that was supplying for Allscripts," said Dobson.

Dobson explained that the trust gave a score to several products and narrowed the options down to the two contenders.

"It came down to SystmOne from TPP and Allscripts; TPP was considered because our community services were already based on TPP, so it would have given us good economy-wide information sharing, but Allscripts had much better clinical functionality and that's what the nurses and doctors wanted," he said.

The five-year deal with Trustmarque will see the IT services company provide both project and programme management services during the implementation phase, as well as ongoing maintenance services. Dobson said that implementation is expected to take 12 to 18 months, with the product going live in the first or second quarter of 2016.

One of the benefits is an estimated £1m-per-year saving by going paperless as the data is made viewable on the Allscripts Sunrise platform.

"It costs us about £1m per year to move papers around the organisation so we will be saving on that, but the benefits will be much greater elsewhere: driving our variation, reducing our spend, reducing the average stay [of our patients]," Dobson said.

The main benefit, he believes, will be clinical improvements.

"With the data that the Allscripts Sunrise platform can deliver, we will be able to advance the patient experience and increase the rate at which we can improve healthcare," he said.

"A system like this will drive out errors," he added.

As part of the contract, WWL will also be using electronic document management software from Hyland, a project that is also being managed by Trustmarque. The solution will be used to store paper-based records that can't be captured elsewhere, such as patient requests for records and paper-based output from diagnostic tools.

Dobson suggested that in the future the trust could look to Allscripts for other solutions, such as a new pharmacy system.