Early Christmas for Kainos

Kainos’ Christmas came early last year when the company signed three NHS trusts to take its Evolve electronic medical records system in one day.

The system, which is in 16 trusts across the country, will be implemented at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS foundation Trust, Luton and Dunstable Hospital NHS Trust and Stockport NHS Foundation trust.

Chelsea and Westminster is replacing its LastWord electronic patient record system functionality – including its patient administration system, e-prescribing and order communications – over the next three years.

Key to its EPR strategy is the introduction of an electronic document management system.

The trust’s IM&T strategy, obtained by EHI under the Freedom of Information Act, says: “The EDM system will act as an enabler to create a single secure, compliant open standards based repository of both clinical and corporate information.”

“This will act as a controlled and validated single source of accurate data providing clinical, administrative and patient centric portals with further portal views for research and education."

It adds that the trust is looking to expand its IT systems to smartphones so clinicians will be able to access records held in Evolve on mobile devices.

Chelsea and Westminster IT manager Bill Gordon told EHI last October that the EDM deal would see about 60m pages scanned into the digital record as patients are due to attend the hospital.

Kainos says Evolve is more than an EDM solution and can be used to prepare the ground for EPR initiatives.

Kainos director Brian Gannon told EHI he was thrilled with the new contracts.

“It takes a long time in the NHS to sell anything and we’d had a bit of a lull, but then in December it suddenly changed,” he said.

“We were expecting to sign Luton and Dunstable that day, so we were quite nervous, but on the Friday before Christmas we also signed Stockport and later the same day, Chelsea and Westminster came into the office and signed too.”

“Chelsea and Westminster is a real flagship hospital in terms of technology. It’s the biggest deal we’ve ever signed,” he explained.

“We have been working with them for two years and it’s taken that long. We would hope to go live at Chelsea and Westminster in six months time, but it depends on what they want.”