As UHP’s new Electronic Patient Record’s go-live date fast approaches, on the 23 July 2026, we hear the reflexions of our colleague Zoe Warwick, a consultant working at the SHiP and helping the One Devon EPR programme with validating the data that is being taken across to the new system.

“Two days of data validation.  I can’t say I was looking forward to it, but I was intrigued to see how successful it had been. Real patient historical results transferred from the legacy system to the new system were listed and were to be reviewed; biochemistry and haematology labs and histology reports today. 

Two large screens. Start with a 10 digit number to identify a patient on the legacy results system.  That number opens up pages of results data and I was remined of the thousands of tests we do on hundreds of patients every day, just in one hospital.  The 10 digit number revealed a date of birth. Now there is a person in my mind, young or old; then their gender and their name. 70 year old Mary, let’s say.  Now my eyes move across the rows and columns of data; over years, each visit to our hospital or the GP, each review, each stay.  Columns of numbers created with increasing frequency and reducing intervals, with more days of testing, more tests per day.  More red flags. A story in numbers over time, chronicled in rows and columns. No words no images, but a picture, a story non the less. One part of Mary’s story.

I find the date, then the time, then the test I have been asked to examine.

Next we find the same test in the same record on the new system to ensure the data migrated over is 100% accurate.  The same 10-digit number opens the record in Epic, same name, same date of birth, but this time a smiling face in the image circle.  Mary. A picture taken at home, in a jumper and necklace, hair done. Maybe for the picture, maybe she always had it nice.  Now the story told in digits has a picture, a face and smiling eyes.

Scrolling through the lab results to find my target test, Mary’s story is re-told, but this time the story feels more personal and I can see in my mind how Mary may have looked, where she might have been when the results reeling past my eyes might have been taken.  The young doctor taking her blood, nervous to fill the bottles needed; the health care assistant chatting to her while she notes down her obs; the anxious son or daughter sitting in the corner. Or maybe she was alone.

Multiple tiny aspects of Mary’s physiology at one captured moment in time collected in a sample bottle and then measured to up to three decimal places. I envisage the lab technician that takes the bottles from the POD capsule, scans the bar code on the bottle and runs the requested tests.  One more identical sample of hundreds methodically processed that day. 

The scientist that oversees the results sign off, who doesn’t know Mary but takes care with the validity of that result as though they did.  The senior clinician reviewing the results as they are uploaded to Mary’s record. Multiple results put together to create a story, which can be interpreted, translated and shared by this clinician with the doctor in training who took the sample. She is building her own learning story, a part of which Mary has become. The story is then retold to Mary and her family. Or just Mary.

Mary will not have been given all the parts of this story of digits up to three decimal places.  She will have had the next line of the story of her years told to her, with warmth and in a way she could understand at that moment, in that place, on that day.

The numbers and units and flags of this result are an exact match in Epic as they are in the legacy system. A happy story for the data analysts who carried each minutely measured moment of Mary’s story from her past chronicle to new fresh pages. 

Pass.  And move on to the next. 

As I note the next 10 digit number to be tested and go back to the screen, I have one last look at the rows and columns of Mary’s record. As the dates progress the tests get more in number and more red flags appear. Then they stop.

The next number is that of a new born, a girl with many columns of tests done before she is even given a name of her own. Many parts of her physiology measured and recorded in numbers, moments of a new life, frozen in time up to three decimal places. The columns of digits had been created with reducing frequency over a 10 day period. Then stopped, I think, when she went home to tired and joyous parents.