Cambridge University Hospitals deployed Epic on 26 October 2014 in what was described as Europe’s first end-to-end Epic implementation. The £200 million, ten-year eHospital programme transferred 2.1 million patient records and required 6,000 new PCs and 395 mobile workstations. In the weeks after launch, pathology results did not reliably match patients because of coding and reporting problems involving Epic and the newly formed Pathology Partnership. GPs were instructed to stop routine blood tests at short notice; some samples were discarded, tests had to be repeated, and about 200 patients were identified as affected. Chief information officer Dr Afzal Chaudhry said more than 90% of the implementation had proceeded successfully, but acknowledged the disruption to clinicians and workflows.
The rollout became part of a broader institutional breakdown rather than an isolated software defect. In September 2015, the Care Quality Commission placed the trust in special measures, while chief executive Dr Keith McNeil and finance director resigned. The trust faced staffing shortages, rising agency costs, treatment delays and a projected £64 million loss for 2015–16; contemporary accounts attributed part of the failure to problems with the new electronic record. The CQC removed the trust from special measures in January 2017, after inspections found improvement. The episode underscored the risks of imposing complex hospital systems on clinical services without adequate transition capacity, even though the trust later received a national digital-exemplar designation.
