Epro featured in HSJ supplement on Innovation through Technology

Our founder Dr Adam Towler was interviewed by Health Service Journal (HSJ) for a supplement on innovation in 2012. In the article, titled ‘You’ve Got Mail’, Towler outlines why he built Epro, a modular electronic patient record system that puts clinicians’ needs at the forefront of its design.

The supplement says:

Dr Adam Towler was working in an NHS skin oncology clinic and experiencing those struggles first hand. Long-term secretarial sick leave meant that letters for patients he had seen up to six months previously had still not been typed.

The problems were exacerbated by the lack of notes available for a significant proportion of the patients he was seeing in clinic. The result, he says: “You have these crazy conversations with the patients when they’ve been coming to your hospital for ten years and you have to ask them: ‘Well, have we ever given you the light treatment, or have we ever given you the tablets that were orange?’

Epro has been built with Dr Towler’s own clinical insight, supporting the wider benefits of digital solutions, the supplement notes:

“You have to understand what motivates the average clinician and in the NHS, in hospitals, that is about seeing a patient,” he argues. “One of the things that clients have said about Epro is that it thinks like a clinician, and that reflects … who built it.”

“You get some people who just love new technology, people at the other end who say over my dead body, and the bulk in the middle,” reports Dr Towler – with proper implementation, the benefits of electronic clinical correspondence systems tend to become clear quickly. Increased productivity for doctors and medical secretaries are the most obvious, but such software can also yield extremely valuable information for management.

Link to source