A new level of care
Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, a leading heart and lung hospital in Cambridgeshire, England, faced the daunting task of adopting a new electronic patient records (EPR) system during their move to a new state-of-the-art facility on the Cambridge biomedical campus.
The hospital, which has around 2,000 staff, is the United Kingdom’s leading cardiothoracic centre and provides regional services for cardiology and for cancer. It also provides national services for transplantation, sleep disorders and pulmonary hypertension. Royal Papworth performed the first successful heart transplant in the United Kingdom and the world’s first successful heart, lung and liver transplant.
But executives at the hospital knew that a comprehensive and flexible EPR would be the cornerstone of the organisation’s digital transformation strategy. The hospital needed to go digital because it wanted to provide better, safer care for patients while delivering operational efficiencies. To reinforce this message, Royal Papworth adopted the slogan, “World-beating care through digital,” as the title of its digital strategy.
The first order of business was shifting to real-time use of systems and driving home the message to the staff that the use of digital systems is as key to delivering care to patients as actually administering the medicines, Digital technology is critical to informing clinical decision-making, optimising resource utilisation and providing information to management about how well the hospital and its patients are doing.
Papworth began the project and migrated to Lorenzo in 2017. It was implemented within 7 months, including full electronic prescriptions’ management and in 2018 they switched on Results and Reporting (R&R). More recently, they have delivered interoperability with Cambridge University Hospitals’ electronic patient records system making it possible to send results from Lorenzo into a different EPR system and return results back into Lorenzo.
With the integrated components for prescription and medicine management, test requests and results, and links to other resources, the hospital has created a “single version of the truth” that improves patient safety and simplifies workflow.
“For the first time ever, we are now fully informed about the whole gamut of interactions and allergies that our patients have, they are presented to us in real time. The document is accurate, it’s legible, it’s clear. And there are electronic checks to make sure that we don’t put a foot wrong when we’re prescribing.”
Chris Johnson, Chief Medical Information Officer, Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Having successfully deployed Lorenzo on time to quality and cost, Royal Papworth moved to their new building in May 2019. The Lorenzo foundation has made it possible to improve the safety of patients while delivering the best care possible in the brand-new hospital.