The Christie goes live with ePROMs on new digital health platform

The Christie NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with an electronic Patient Reported Outcome Measures (ePROMs) system which connects cancer patients with the trust.

The ePROMS is part of the trust’s five-year strategy where it it aims to modernise its electronic health record which includes underpinning it by openEHR data standards. As part of that strategy, The Christie selected Better last September to deliver a digital health platform.

ePROMs is the first of more than 680 forms which will be digitalised by the trust using Better’s low-code tools with 24 forms being launched across 10 cancer pathways and a further 10 more are planned for by the end of this year

The development of the ePROMs saw the joining up and structuring of siloed data to be used in the forms. The data that is collected then feeds into the Better platform, so that data from both patients and clinicians is made instantly available trust-wide.

Simultaneously, the digital team at The Christie developed a new patient scheduling module within the existing EHR. This supports clinicians and researchers in scheduling questionnaires faster and more reliably. Through an app, patients can receive notifications to complete forms that will support their care.

Professor Janelle Yorke, ePROMs senior responsible officer at the trust, said: “The seamless integration of patient captured ePROMs with the trust’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) was a key objective of the programme to close the loop between remote monitored patients and clinicians on the frontline. The Christie ePROMs initiative is key to the ambition of becoming a world leader in real-world outcomes research.”

The new service is saving clinicians’ time in conducting telephone reviews and enhancing patient communication. In the long term, The Christie intends to integrate the Better platform with other applications into the vendor-neutral data layer.

Matthew Cox, managing director of Better for the UK and Ireland, said: “The new digital forms have transformed data entry and recording at the trust, and we are delighted The Christie has selected Better for its new digital health platform. We’re pleased to see momentum now towards healthcare organisations choosing open data and open standards, and The Christie is leading the way for acute NHS providers in England.”