EPR Benefits: Your View?
Author: Tom Norton
Should we avoid baking so many "weighty" benefits into EPR business cases?
This is what's driving the question:
The inclusion of benefits in EPR (Electronic Patient Record) business cases in the NHS can serve several purposes, such as justifying investments, demonstrating value, and ensuring effective implementation. However, there may be reasons to reconsider the practice of building benefits into EPR business cases. Here are a few potential arguments against it:
Sometimes, the benefits projected in EPR business cases can be overly optimistic or based on assumptions that do not align with the reality of implementation. This can lead to disappointment and scepticism if the expected benefits are not achieved, undermining the credibility of future business cases.
If benefits are incorporated into business cases without a robust framework for tracking and measuring them, it becomes difficult to hold accountable the individuals responsible for delivering those benefits. Without clear accountability, it becomes challenging to learn from successes and failures and make necessary adjustments for future projects.
Placing too much emphasis on financial benefits in EPR business cases can inadvertently shift attention away from the primary goal of improving patient care. While cost savings and efficiencies are important considerations, they should not overshadow the potential impact on patient outcomes, safety, and experience.
When benefits are tightly integrated into business cases, there can be a tendency to focus on incremental improvements and immediate financial gains. This approach may discourage innovative thinking and limit opportunities for transformative change. It's crucial to foster an environment that encourages experimentation and exploration of new technologies and processes.
Implementing EPR systems in healthcare settings is a complex endeavour that involves numerous variables and uncertainties. Benefits realisation can be influenced by factors beyond the control of the project team, such as changes in clinical practices, evolving technology, or shifting organisational priorities. Relying heavily on benefits in business cases can overlook these complexities and lead to misguided decision-making.
While it may not be necessary to completely stop building benefits into EPR business cases, it's important to approach it with caution.
Instead, a more balanced approach that considers realistic expectations, accountability mechanisms, patient centric outcomes, innovation, and the complexities of implementation can help ensure that EPR projects in the NHS are appropriately evaluated. Understanding that implementations themselves perhaps do not yield the scale of benefits that are often sighted, but instead they are a foundation stone on which critical programmes of optimisation and continuous improvement can be built.?
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?? Don't miss Tom's follow up article "Building a Strong Case for Post-Implementation Optimisation to Deliver Benefits".
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EHR Programme Director
1 年I completely understand why you’ve thrown this thought out there Tom, I wonder if it’s worth distinguising the financial (cash-realising ROI) type benefits with the economically useful benefits that help determine a preferred option for the Trust based on efficiencies, for example? I am yet to really believe that an EPR business case has been ‘paid back’ with the projected benefits or if a full 2-10 year realisation programme has been measured ??♀?
Director at Seagry Consultancy Ltd
1 年This is excellent thank you Tom. The benefits identification process is often undertaken in order to justify the investment, and as a result those benefits are prone to exageration. But at the same time there is an almost universal acceptance that some sort of EPR is a basic requirement for all NHS providers, so the emphasis on the justification is rather odd. We should be using benefits identification and realisation capture to enhance and improve implementation, rather than to support justification for something we all think is needed in the first place.