West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust plans to invest more than £67m in IM&T over the next five years.
The trust’s new IM&T strategy describes the provision of a ‘Digital Hospital Environment’ that will “exploit new technology to support agile working, eliminate paper, enable service transformation, reduce administrative overheads and improve patient experience.”
Practically, it will be implemented via six strategic workstreams. A clinical systems workstream will replace the trust’s current patient administration system with a fully integrated electronic patient records system at a cost of around £22m.
A work programme schedule says the EPR, which will replace an iSoft Clinicom system, will be deployed by quarter three of the 2015-16 financial year.
An e-prescribing programme will also be implemented by that date and a telehealth solution will be deployed between 2014 and 2016.
Service management will be improved at a cost of £2.8m and nearly £40m will be invested in infrastructure to increase the security and resilience of LAN and WAN network services.
About £2m will be spent on a replacement data warehouse that will leverage information from the EPRand will be implemented together with a single trust-wide business intelligence solution capable of integrating clinical and non-clinical information.
The structure of the IM&T department will be revised at a cost of £900,000, and a non-clinical systems workstream will get investment of £100,000 to exploit back office systems to ensure value for money.
Together these projects represent an investment of more than £67m. The strategy says individual business cases will be developed where capital funding is required.
“This IM&T strategy represents an opportunity for the trust to deliver IM&T systems and services that will enable service transformation that will keep pace with rapid developments in clinical practice whilst delivering the operational efficienciesnecessary in this new era of financial austerity,” it says.
“It may be possible to offset some of the costs in this strategy through consideration of alternative approaches to IM&T infrastructure service. A separate assessment of IM&T infrastructure sourcing options is now underway.”