Blog – Review of Nervecentre over the last year

by Paul Volkaerts, CEO Nervecentre

As it’s the end of another financial year for Nervecentre, it is a good opportunity for us to look back on what’s been a really interesting year from a digitisation point of view and from a healthcare technology point of view. With so many challenges happening across the economy and across healthcare, this has been a year of really true transformation in digital healthcare so I’m just going to spend a little time reflecting on the last twelve months and then looking forward to the next twelve months.

The financial year started for us back in August 2019 with two really amazing pieces of news for the Nervecentre journey to become what we want to be, which is the best EPR, for the NHS.

Two big pieces of news, the first that we were awarded a position on the HSS lot 1 framework. This is a rubber stamping by the NHS Digital that we were considered an EPR in their view which was really great. Then the second was the contract with Leicester’s Hospitals – our first full EPR contract with a really ambitious plan to replace all of the systems that Leicester including their PAS, their e-prescribing system, their orders and results system, all within a two year period of time. So a year after we’ve signed the EPR contract with Leicester the EPR at Leicester looks amazing, it really does look so good. There’s so much rich clinical data in the EPR. They are live with tens and tens of assessments fluid balance, clinical photography, hospital at night, clinical noting, vital signs, sepsis, a whole suite of really strong critical functions so that the EPR itself looks rich and full of valuable data.

The ED system was already live at Leicester’s Hospitals so we’ve got all of that information being captured and collected and used throughout the whole patient pathway. The latest at Leicester is that within UAT we have our EPMA solution which we’re really excited to say is going to be going live next month. So much work has gone into that; we’re so proud of our EPMA. I honestly think it’s probably the best EPMA that exists on the planet right now. We’ve done such a thorough job of managing all of the variation of complex medicines that can occur so we’re very proud of it and we’re very eager to see how that makes a difference.

It’s been a good year for new trusts choosing Nervecentre and for existing customers of ours to continue to wish to do more and more with us we’ve sold three ED contracts this year including East Sussex which is really a great sign of the strength of our ED solution. Our ED solution was already live in Northumbria, Lister and Leicester hospitals, so having three new customers look to deploy us within ED just shows that that focus on ED which is which has been constant for the last few years and will remain a constant can be helped by the choice of the right technology.

Other contracts wins include a 5 year contract with Bedfordshire Hospitals selecting our Patient Safety, Patient Flow and Inpatient Paperless solutions. Existing customers have also extended contracts with us whilst also adding on additional software solutions. These include East Sussex Hospitals and Doncaster and Bassetlaw Hospitals who are taking on our Patient Safety and Inpatient Solution.

Obviously one of the things that has dominated the last 6 months has been the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve been really proud of the way that we as an organization and our teams have stepped up to do what we can for hospitals during this period. We had a conference call at the beginning of the pandemic that we invited all of our customers to, to discuss how Nervecentre can be used to track and trace Covid patients. We made it clear that we would do anything for those customers that we could whether it was work or whether it was licensing of new software during that four-month period without any cost to our customers just to help them move as quickly as they humanly could in dealing with the things that they had to deal with.

We’ve had big drive towards social distancing – working from home, working remotely but our work hasn’t stopped, if anything, we’ve been busier than ever, as we know our customers have been, busier than ever, but we’ve done much more of that over video and much more of that remotely. I’m really proud of