Three NHS trusts have agreed to set up a community interest company with IMS Maxims to guide the development of its open source electronic patient record system.
Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust have agreed in principle to formally establish the CIC before the end of the year, it was announced at NHS England's Open Source Open Day in Newcastle.
In March, NHS England said it was looking to set up a number of CICs to act as custodians for open source products introduced to the NHS and undertake activities such as testing and code control.
The CICs are also meant to help less technically able trusts take open source solutions by providing the same assurances as with a proprietary vendor.
Malcolm Senior, the IT director at Taunton, told EHI the CIC will help to foster a spirit of collaboration between clinicians and developers across the trusts as they work on implementing and improving the openMaxims EPR.
"For me, this is about going right back to the 80s when the NHS was fantastic at collaborating together and getting clinicians and developers to sit down and work together – that's exactly what we want to do."
Senior said the CIC will be able to use the experience of clinicians across the three trusts to cover "the whole breadth of clinical systems".
"We've actually pulled people out at cost to be part of this, because this to me feels like the right way to do it."
The trusts have already spoken about sending teams to each other's hospitals to work together on system development and support, he said.
Senior said Taunton's chief executive will chair the CIC, having had several meetings with NHS England to discuss her concerns about open source – before being won over.
The costs of setting up the CIC will not be significant and would be mitigated by reducing the duplication of effort amongst trusts, he said.
"We'll all chip in, but we all would have had to chip in independently before – this way we're spending money but only spending it once."
Rowan Pritchard-Jones, the chief clinical information officer of St Helen's and Knowsley, said clinical leadership will be a key part of the trusts' work with the CIC and on the EPR.
"We need clinical leadership and focus at the heart of every bit of design that we do."
Pritchard-Jones said improving collaboration is logical given the shared issues facing trusts. "We often have the same set of needs, wants and worries."
Shane Tickell, the chief executive of IMS Maxims, said the CIC will provide an independent governance body with sufficient knowledge and balance to guide the open source community as it works on the EPR.
Tickell said the company's work with the trusts is creating a UK benchmark for how open source EPRs can be implemented as it learns from the process.
"The journey isn't finished, and we don't have all the answers today, but we're working towards that."