Electronic health records firm Epic Bristol bags £454m in UK deals as creaking care sector chases digital transformation
- Reference: 1592385307
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/06/17/epic_bristol_uk_contract_wins/
- Source link:
In the first, the software company [1]has been awarded a deal to support and develop an integrated electronic health and care record system across acute, community, social and primary care settings for Health and Social Care Northern Ireland (HSCNI).
Unusually for the UK, Northern Ireland has an integrated health and social care system. The aim of the contract is to provide a single health and social care record for every citizen in the region.
Under the terms of the deal, worth £273.4m, the supplier is expected to provide information systems and servers, software packages, developer skills, data services, consultancy and software support. The deal is for 10 years with an option to extend for another five.
Earlier this month, Northern Ireland health minister Robin Swann [2]told the Northern Ireland Assembly that the health and social care system was in "very serious difficulties" even before COVID-19 arrived. Finding better ways of delivering services would require innovation, sustained investment and society-wide support, he said.
Encompass, the Northern Ireland programme to introduce the new system, will replace a patchwork of legacy systems and paperwork.
"Every citizen will have one health and social care record," said Gary Loughran, director of Encompass. "Doctors, nurses, and social workers can see social information, such as job loss or lack of transportation, which can be barriers to a patient's health. When a patient is discharged from hospital, information in the patient's chart can be used to make recommendations to social services or home care. We will be able to provide better care as a team to help our citizens stay well."
In another contract win, Epic Bristol secured a £181m deal with Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust. It is designed to provide electronic health records which will become the "operating system" for the trust, [3]the contract award notice said . ®
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[1] https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:280672-2020:TEXT:EN:HTML&src=0
[2] https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/swann-reveals-future-of-northern-ireland-health-service-post-covid-19-39271426.html
[3] https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:272997-2020:TEXT:EN:HTML&src=0
[4] https://go.theregister.com/tl/1956/-8478/why-container-security-matters-to-your-business?td=wptl1956
another closed system with no upgrade path
whoever was on the pannel should be taken out and given some tea because clearly they cant be sane
A 2014 report by the RAND Corporation described Epic as a "closed" platform that made it "challenging and costly for hospitals" to interconnect with the clinical or billing software of other companies.[18] The report also cited other research showing that Epic's implementation in the Kaiser Permanente system led to efficiency losses.
does it link to anything else without costly "variations" ?
good luck
Re: another closed system with no upgrade path
From my experience of NHS related procurement chances are they gave "assurances" that APIs etc would be created to help with integration with other systems.
These assurances are likely not part of the contract though or come at considerable cost with no fixed timescales.
Disclaimer - not part of the process for these products but it sounds like it's going to be a complete disaster already.
The company is Epic, the largest electronic health record company in the US, not “Epic Bristol”. That is just the UK office.
Their HQ address is brilliant:
Intergalactic Headquarters
1979 Milky Way
Verona, Wisconsin 53593
Hmm
Intuitively this is a good idea, but how beneficial is this in reality? NPfIT was a right expensive dogs dinner and if I recall the need to call up remote patient data was relatively rare...
From an information security perspective, aggregation of odd bits of lowly classified information to form a highly informative whole is a right headache that at least the GDPR has tried to address in some form. But including a population-wide centralised database of whole life history, surely that would be heading up to secret classification in aggregation?