UK's Bolton NHS Trust Goes Live with OpenEyes Open Source Software

A million-pound open source electronic patient record has gone live in a northern NHS trust’s eye department. Bolton NHS Foundation Trust deployed the ophthalmic OpenEyes software in January. David Haider, consultant ophthalmologist and chief clinical information officer at Bolton, told Digital Health News that he was doing a “slow deployment”, with the EPR being used in cataracts first.

“Because we’re running from a fairly digitally immature trust, we didn’t want to do anything too fast.” Haider said the deployment had “not been particularly painful at all... I tend to be a little more, I’d say pragmatic, others might say pessimistic, but I was expecting more resistance than I got, actually staff were really positive about it.”

The project was funded with  £500,000 from Safer Hospital, Safer Wards Technology Fund, which was matched by the trust. Haider said the money was used to upgrade Bolton’s basic eye care hardware to allow it to handle an EPR. It was also used to adapt and expand the software so that it could be “easily deployed into similar hospitals in the future for a lot less”. For instance, the money was used to build a HL7 messaging function in OpenEyes, he said...