NHSX and NHS England have published a list of accredited suppliers of electronic patient record solutions, in a bid to give purchasers in the NHS more confidence in their route to digitisation.
NHS England and NHSX have developed a new section on the Health Systems Support Framework to help organisations and integrated care systems get best value for money when buying new digital services, software and infrastructure.
Eight companies – which have been evaluated and assured to deliver the most robust systems – are on the framework’s Lot 1 list, and meet a wide range of key criteria - including ability to integrate with other IT systems.
The framework was created to provide services that support the delivery of integrated care – including population health management – and the new EPR section will provide access to supplier systems able to meet the Global Digital Exemplars (GDE) standards. It will mean Trusts and other NHS entities can digitise more quickly.
Matthew Gould, CEO of NHSX, said: “Helping clinicians access and share data effectively is crucial for patient safety. Today’s announcement is about giving care providers the tools they need to achieve this, and a key part of our mission to ensure the NHS benefits from the very best digital services.”
The bidders were evaluated by experts from NHS England and Improvement, NHSX, NHS Digital, Department of Health and Social Care, local care provider organisations, regional teams and national bodies and included stakeholders such as chief information officers, chief clinical information officers, chief nurse information officers, clinical safety officers and front-line clinical staff.
A high quality bar, which tested the bidders against a number of functional requirements within existing deployed solutions, was set to ensure that only the most capable bidders were successful. Suppliers were permitted to offer this functionality within a sole solution or across multiple integrated solutions within a supply chain partnership. Eight suppliers were successful – Allscripts, Cerner, DXC, IMS Maxims, Nervecentre, Meditech, TPP and System C.
All of these suppliers were asked to demonstrate not only how they would deliver enterprise wide solutions but also how they could provide thinner deployments that provide a basis for modular solutions (with or without SMEs and other partners), how they would support the vision set out in “The Future of healthcare: our vision for digital, data and technology in health and care,” and how they would interoperate with other systems to ensure that data is available to clinicians at the point of need and to support the creation of integrated local health and care records.
