Bringing three NHS Trusts toward a shared electronic patient record (EPR) is a major undertaking. For BSW Hospitals Group, it also means aligning technology and clinical practice while preparing for a demanding delivery timeline.
BSW Group CDIO Jonathan Hinchliffe recently discussed how Leapwork has helped provide testing capacity and quality that his team would otherwise struggle to resource. His experience offers key practical lessons for other NHS Trusts managing complex digital change with limited time and people.
“I can’t support Leapwork enough. I had a gap, and I needed a supplier to support me and do something differently. And Leapwork and Accenture stepped in, and they have supported me to do it differently.” – Jonathan Hinchliffe, CDIO, BSW Hospitals Group
1. Testing capacity is a patient safety issue
Clinical workflows often depend on several applications working together. If one part fails, it can interrupt clinicians’ work and affect the care patients receive. That makes thorough testing essential, even as NHS Trusts introduce new digital systems and change existing ones.
The people who understand how a clinical workflow should operate may be clinicians or digital specialists, not software developers. Manual checks draw on that expertise, but they also take time and can be difficult to repeat at scale. Jonathan said that without Leapwork, he would have struggled to resource enough people to test manually, build and test scripts, and coordinate the work between clinicians, programme teams and testing staff.
For BSW, Leapwork has helped address that capacity gap. Other NHS Trusts can take a similar lesson from Jonathan’s experience: make testing capacity part of the transformation plan, so that essential assurance does not depend on teams finding additional time they do not have.
“Without Leapwork, then I think we’d have been seeing a struggle to resource enough people to manually test, to understand how to build scripts, how to test those scripts, and how to do that three-way handshake between clinician, program, testing, script building.”
– Jonathan Hinchcliffe, CDIO, BSW Hospitals Group
2. Complex EPR rollouts need repeatable assurance
BSW’s transformation aims to bring three NHS Trusts toward a shared EPR environment and more consistent clinical workflows. That requires teams to align systems and ways of working, then check that configurations and processes behave as expected.
Jonathan described a high-volume example: testing 17,000 configured prescribing variations across the three hospitals. The scale of that work shows why repeatability matters. Automating checks of this kind can help teams test consistently while allowing clinicians and digital specialists to apply their judgment.
Jonathan also emphasized what automation means for assurance, noting, “what we’ve been able to do is really understand our assurance. So by ultimatum, you don’t remove assurance at all. You are making it more comprehensive. And that’s really important.” In BSW’s case, that broader assurance supports confidence among clinicians, executives and programme partners. For other NHS Trusts, automation can help extend the reach of testing during a rollout without removing the expertise and oversight that clinical systems require.
“Leapwork for me has delivered quality, and it’s delivered a capacity which I do not have.”
– Jonathan Hinchcliffe, CDIO, BSW Hospitals Group
3. Quality assurance must continue after go-live
Go-live is a milestone, not the end of the testing work. EPRs and related applications continue to evolve, and teams need to keep checking that essential workflows still work as intended.
Jonathan described Leapwork as important not only for the immediate programme but for the work that follows. He identified areas where the team could extend automation, including medicines, data migration, reporting, and training environments, clinical logic and clinical catalogues. He also discussed reusing automated checks across grades and applications that work with EPR.
Reusable testing can help teams avoid repeating manual effort every time systems change, while maintaining a consistent approach across locations. Other NHS Trusts can use the same principle when planning how they will sustain assurance after their own go-live events.
“We’ve got to deliver a huge, first-in-type EPR program. Without Leapwork providing me with a quality of testing, without them providing me with the capacity to test, and I’m going from a rather intriguing three Trusts into one single instance, I don’t know how I would fund it, resource it, and meet a rather strict timeline.”
– Jonathan Hinchcliffe, CDIO, BSW Hospitals Group
A model other Trusts can learn from
BSW’s best-in-class example shows how automation can help NHS Trusts address a shared set of pressures: large testing workloads, limited staff capacity and the need to maintain reliable clinical workflows through change.
Leapwork works with NHS Trusts to automate testing across EPRs and related clinical systems, helping teams reduce manual effort and gain confidence in their testing. Other NHS organisations have used Leapwork to replace recurring testing processes that previously took days or required several team members to carry out. See how Leapwork helps NHS Trusts.
“I’ve got confidence that with Leapwork, Accenture, and [our] other partners, we are going to deliver on time for our patients. And we’re going to improve our quality and safety.” – Jonathan Hinchcliffe, CDIO, BSW Hospitals Group
For a closer look at how Jonathan and BSW Hospitals Group are applying automated testing to their EPR transformation, watch an on-demand session featuring Jonathan’s discussing his Leapwork experience at HETT.
