Bolton NHS Foundation Trust is now live with the Allscripts Sunrise acute care electronic patient record (EPR).

Bolton’s emergency department is now using Sunrise for electronic prescribing and order communications, while e-prescribing, order communications, clinical documentation and Sunrise Mobile are live in wards.

The trust deployed Sunrise in A&E and across all wards at the Royal Bolton Hospital at the start of October, using a pathway approach. This meant that once patients were registered on the system, they continued to have their information recorded electronically, to avoid a mix of paper and electronic working.

Phillipa Winter, CIO of Bolton NHS Foundation Trust, said: “After months of planning, it was fabulous to be able to celebrate a successful go-live and a significant step in our digital transformation journey,”

“The implementation has been a testament to the partnership, commitment and teamwork of the trust, its suppliers and their implementation teams.

“The new system has been enthusiastically received by staff and a high proportion of our patients are now having all their details recorded on the EPR.”

Bolton NHS Foundation Trust is using a ‘clinical wrap’ deployment model, meaning it has retained its DXC patient administration system, and is ‘wrapping’ Sunrise Acute Care clinical functionality around it.

The trust has also gone live with a “first of type” interface between Sunrise and its pharmacy system, supplied by EMIS Health, which will enable it to introduce closed loop e-prescribing and medicines administration.

Closed loop systems are required by the highest levels of the HIMSS electronic medical records adoption model (EMRAM) and, in the case of EMIS ePMA, means that the whole process of prescribing, dispensing and administering a drug is done electronically.

Bolton has additionally introduced foundational elements of Allscripts’ electronic document management solution (EDMS), which will support business continuity planning, and in the next phase will enable clinicians to access information during any scheduled or non-scheduled downtime.

It will also enable information that is still captured on paper to be displayed in Sunrise – such as ambulance notes – and make them available to staff in A&E.

Allscripts labelled the go-live “one of the most extensive initial deployments for the Allscripts electronic patient record in the UK.”

Richard Strong, the supplier’s managing director of EMEA, said: “This go-live was not only a ‘big bang’ implementation, but one of the largest scopes for an initial deployment of Sunrise Acute Care that we have seen in an NHS trust.

“Naturally, this has meant that the past few weeks have been extremely busy, but the Trust’s operations team has been phenomenal in managing the introduction of the EPR and in working with us to keep perceptions positive and adoption high.

“Bolton’s success is also an endorsement of the clinical wrap approach that we are seeing adopted by an increasing number of UK trusts, and we look forward to working with the Trust on the next phases of its digital journey.”

Bolton NHS Foundation Trust announced that it was buying Sunrise Acute Care in 2017, in a contract worth around £30m.

It joins a cluster of trusts in the Greater Manchester area that are working with Allscripts, including GDE trust Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust and Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust, where the company has supported an innovative ‘digital experience centre’ that opened in October 2019.

Gloucestershire Hospitals announced in December that it too had gone live with Sunrise, just five months after signing with Allscripts.

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