West Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust has gone out to tender for an electronic patient record system.
The tender says the ambulance trust wants a system which supports integrated care and can be rolled out across the region.
“The EPR will equip the trust with a system that enables the West Midlands Ambulance Service to capture the clinical care given to patients, transfer this data to appropriate stakeholders and to learn from the data we capture,” says the tender.
“This system will support the delivery of integrated patient care by West Midlands Ambulance Service and our external stakeholders.”
The trust does not specify which modules it wants the EPR to have, but the tender is classed as a document creation, drawing, imaging, scheduling and productivity software package, which a trust spokesperson said may or may not be required as additional IT provision for the EPR.
The contract will last three years, and a spokesperson from the trust told EHI that the estimated value of the contract has not been set.
“The tender opportunity has been published through OJEU as the value of the contract is expected to exceed the OJEU threshold, the actual value of the contract is not known because WMAS are still in the ‘Invitation to Tender’ stage,” said the spokesperson.
West Midlands Ambulance is also a part of 16 other organisations across Birmingham, Sandwell and Sollihull working on a joint care record project.
The trust spokesperson added that in the future, it may allow other ambulance trusts in the country to use the contract managed by West Midlands Ambulance Service” if they so wish at any time during the contract once it has been awarded.”
The ambulance trust provides emergency cover for more than 5m people in the region. Last year it took over as interim provider of NHS Direct’s 111 contract in the West Midlands as the organisation withdrew from all its contracts, claiming they were ‘financially unsustainable.”