Queen Victoria Hospital to launch EPR in November 2025

Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Foundation Trust will launch its first electronic patient record (EPR) system in November 2025.

The trust awarded a £10 million contract for its EPR system to Insight Direct in April 2024, subcontracting services to Altera.

Implementation work began in 2024 and the trust announced that core elements relating to inpatients, outpatients, electronic prescribing, theatres and minor injuries and reporting modules will go live in 50 days from 25 September 2025.

The EPR, named ‘Archie’, after pioneering plastic surgeon Sir Archibald McIndoe, will support the trust in transforming how its staff work every day.

Tamara Everington, chief medical officer at Queen Victoria Hospital, said: “The Archie EPR programme is not just a technological upgrade; it represents a fundamental cultural shift in the way Queen Victoria Hospital operates.

“Patient care will remain at the heart of our mission with this change enabling staff to deliver care more efficiently by being able to access digitised records when they need it.”

The introduction of Archie EPR is part of the trust’s long-term strategy to become a fully digitally enabled NHS provider.

It is being delivered in conjunction with Altera, using its Sunrise EPR platform, to bring information currently stored in different places together into one place, so it is accessible to staff when needed.

NHS England supported the trust with funding through its £1.9bn frontline digitisation project to help all trusts across England to have an EPR system in place by 2026.

Archie EPR is intended to support service transformation and integration, allowing clinical teams across care settings in Sussex, Surrey and Kent to receive information from a single, unified source of data.

Clinicians will be able to receive electronic notifications to undertake reviews and guides for decision support, with the aim of ensuring proactive and responsive care.

The contract with Altera will run for an initial period of five years, taking it up to March 2029, with the potential for it to be extended for a further two years, up to a maximum contract length of  seven years.

Meanwhile, in May 2025, NHSE awarded a ‘tiger teams’ contract worth £13.3 million to consultancy firm KPMG to support trusts unlikely to meet the March 2026 EPR target.

It will focus on NHS secondary trusts which have said they expect to miss the 2026 government EPR target, including Blackpool Teaching Hospitals Foundation Trust; Doncaster and Bassetlaw Teaching Hospitals FT; Royal Orthopaedic Hospital FT; Sherwood Forest Hospitals FT; Stockport FT; University Hospitals Liverpool Group and University Hospitals Sussex FT.

In July 2023, Vin Diwakar, national director of transformation at NHSE, said that every trust across the NHS was on track to have an EPR in place by March 2026.