Bristol trust tenders for EPR

University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust has published a tender notice for a patient administration and electronic patient record system to provide its clinicians with access to increasing amounts of clinical information.

The notice placed in the Official Journal of the European Union says that the trust wishes to replace its current core PAS, key clinical information systems and clinical portal to instead build an electronic patient record system.

The tender notice states that the core PAS solution will be required to cover, amongst other functions: “patient registration, inpatient care, waiting lists, out-patients, coding, casenote tracking, bed management clinical data collection, referral to treatment pathways, Choose and Book compliance, audit reports and comprehensive data extraction facilities for all other reporting purposes.”

Although the trust has gone out to tender with the intention of working towards a full electronic patient record, it is asking multiple suppliers to bid for a series of lots.

The tender notice states: “The trust wishes to procure, either as part of the PAS contract or under a separate but integrated system… accident and emergency, operating theatres, maternity and a clinical portal.”

It adds that the clinical portal will need to provide patient-contextual access to multiple clinical information systems, initially within the trust but potentially extending to other systems across the community.

Bristol once planned to implement Cerner Millennium under the National Programme for IT in the NHS in 2009.

The trust’s 2007-2012 IM&T strategy says it also planned to replace the majority of the interim systems that it put in place prior to the national programme by 2011. By then, it was hoping that the benefits of an integrated national Cerner-based system would be being realised.

The strategy states that the trust was planning on implementing a domain solution (where two or more trusts share the same hardware and database in order to mitigate risk and cut costs) with North Bristol NHS Trust.

Although University Hospitals of Bristol appear to have put themselves outside the programme since the strategy was published, North Bristol still intends to go-live with Cerner this year.

University Hospitals Bristol told eHealth Insider it was unable to comment on the tender as it was in the middle of the procurement process.