As part of the programme, we are employing an additional 16.8 WTE within the MPFT Digital Team to support its implementation, and allow our substantive resources to keep their focus on the other areas of digital transformation outlined in the strategy. This recruitment is currently on-going with the hope of having staff in post throughout December 2023 and January 2024.
We hope that the programme will provide meaningful change to our front line staff. Improved functionality within RiO will mean that staff can access more within a single location, reducing the amount of other systems that need to be logged into.
The DCF Programme will run for 18 months and officially commenced in October 2023 when the £1.029m funding was received from NHS England. The programme is still in its early days, but as shown by the graphic below, there are a number of projects that are due to go live by March 2024. Budget planning with Finance colleagues is also on-going to ensure the funding is spent in its allotted years to enable us to deliver the projects. At present, we are awaiting the start dates of many of the 16.8 WTE DCF roles that will support its delivery. The remainder of this report will provide details of on-going projects within the programme, new project start dates and the delays we are facing due to the postponed RiO Upgrade.
As the DCF Programme is focussed around RiO improvements, in some cases we require an updated version of the EPR to install these modules. The Trust are currently working with The Access Group to upgrade our RiO instance from version 23.04 to 24.01. There have been some delays in MPFT’s journey to update to a newer version of RiO due to software issues that have been identified through the Trusts thorough testing cycles. At present, this means there are some delays to DCF Projects displayed in yellow on the right.
MPFT are at the forefront of the developments around our core EPR acting as we are “1st of Type” across the UK for RiO testing and functionality upgrades. MPFT’s ambitious plans for its RiO EPR have been developed to improve the RiO system for our staffs and patients and to improve our information sharing with our colleague healthcare organisations and staffs. Over the next year we are planning on introducing lots of improvements and changes in RiO.
Click here to view the full detailed leaflet of the DCF Programme