Electronic patient records: why the NHS urgently needs a strategy to reap the benefits (The Health Foundation, 9 April 2025)

Summary

The NHS is on the cusp of achieving 100% electronic patient record coverage in England, a significant milestone. However, research from the Health Foundation shows more needs to be done to reap the benefits.

Content

Key points

• Although England is on the verge of every NHS trust having an electronic patient record (EPR) system, a small number of organisations are still struggling to reach this milestone, and many more aren’t yet using these systems to their full potential.
• Used well, EPRs can deliver important improvements to care quality and productivity, ensuring staff have access to health information and supporting them to deliver safe and effective care.
• To explore the challenges in realising the benefits of EPRs, we conducted interviews with leaders in five acute NHS trusts in England, and also looked at an example from a leading US medical centre. This piece presents insights from these interviews and recommends next steps for unlocking the potential of EPRs.
• Simply ‘digitising paper’ doesn’t change the way we deliver care. NHS organisations need to be able to deploy EPR systems effectively to reap their benefits. Procuring and installing EPRs is merely the starting point for this journey.
• The experience of the US, where many providers are several years ahead of the UK in EPR use, reveals the hill to climb: reaching meaningful use of EPRs requires time, investment and cultural change. NHS providers can learn from those organisations in the UK and abroad who are further ahead with their EPR journeys.
• The government urgently needs to set out an EPR strategy for the NHS to facilitate effective benefits realisation – both to ensure trusts are getting the basics right, and to help develop and deploy higher order functionalities including AI. This will be as important as any digitisation plan of the last 20 years. Trusts will ultimately bear some of the responsibility for good implementation and usage of EPRs, and should be asked to develop their own plans to sit alongside the national roadmap.
• There’s no avoiding the fact that capitalising on EPRs is going to require more funding. But the prize further down the line will be advances in care quality and productivity. Having already made significant investment in acquiring EPRs, it is essential that NHS organisations are now supported to realise these benefits.
• There’s no time to lose. While the few trusts still to put EPRs in place need support to do so, the next stage of this strategy cannot wait for that.