St Thomas' Hospital is on the banks of the river Thames in London   Credit: Dominic Lipinski/PA Archive/PA Images

A supplier is being sought to provide a long-term electronic health records platform to be used by as many as 35,000 staff across three inner London NHS trusts.

Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust has issued a contract notice seeking potential suppliers of “an enterprise-wide single EHR solution” to be implemented for use across the organisation’s 16,000 staff. 

The trust wishes to identify a platform “with the option to subsequently scale up the system” and extend it across two other trusts in the capital: King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, which employs 15,000 people; and Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust, which has 4,000 workers.

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The system must also provide access to GPs across the areas served by the trusts, as well as to all relevant clinical commissioning groups.

The chosen platform will replace a “disparate number of clinical systems that are [currently] used to track a patient through their care pathway”.

“Individually, these systems are well-established and used by staff as the primary application for their purpose,” the contract notice said. “However, collectively, the core applications provide differing capabilities in support of the day-to-day clinical and operational processes, which results in data not being integrated and managed as a single data set. This requires effort and cost to integrate views of data from different sources, additional time to view ‘longitudinal’ data about a patient through several applications, and in some cases manual re-entry by front-line clinical staff of data captured elsewhere.”

Bids for the project are open until 10 June, after which up to four potential suppliers will be assessed. 

The winning bidder will be signed up to a 10-year contract, with an option to extend this engagement by a further five years.