Maximise your EPR investment: The power of benefits realisation

Electronic health records (EPRs) reshape healthcare, promising enhanced patient care, streamlined operations, and data-driven innovation. Yet, studies show up to 70% of digital health projects fail to deliver expected value due to inadequate planning.

At Nordic, a trusted leader in health IT consulting with over 3,300 professionals serving 700+ clients worldwide, we’ve seen firsthand how benefits realisation - the disciplined process of defining, tracking and optimising value - transforms EPR implementations into strategic successes.

Learn why benefits realisation is critical, how it overcomes common challenges, and practical steps to ensure your EPR delivers measurable impact for patients, clinicians, and your organisation. 

Why benefits realisation matters

EPRs are more than digital tools, they are catalysts for achieving strategic healthcare goals:

• Improved patient outcomes: Real-time alerts and coordinated care reduce medication errors by 46%, enhancing safety and treatment efficacy.
• Workforce efficiency: EPRs cut administrative tasks by nearly 25%, freeing clinicians to focus on care.
• Financial sustainability: NHS trusts with mature EPRs deliver real financial returns; Manchester University NHS FT forecasts £390m in net benefits over its EPR lifecycle, while East London NHS FT achieved £32.8m in savings in 2024/25 through reduced agency spend and admin automation.
• Enhanced patient experience: EPR-integrated portals drive engagement, enabling seamless record access and self-management.
• Future-readiness: High-quality data enables AI, analytics, and population health management, positioning organisations for long-term innovation.

Our experience with Epic, Oracle Health, and MEDITECH implementations shows that structured benefits planning correlates with higher adoption and ROI, ensuring investments deliver tangible results. Benefits realisation bridges the gap from implementation to impact, aligning systems with your organisation’s priorities.

Overcoming barriers to success

EPR projects often face hurdles that diminish value. Our benefits realisation approach addresses these challenges:

1. Low adoption and usability issues: Systems that disrupt clinical workflows can lead to resistance and workarounds, often due to poor usability or lack of integration with existing processes. Many EPRs struggle to achieve seamless data exchange across platforms. Nordic’s user-centric design and tailored training programs ensure systems enhance workflows, fostering strong clinician adoption and minimising resistance.
2. Go-live focus: Organisations frequently measure success at system launch, overlooking that most benefits emerge over time during post-implementation phases. Nordic’s ongoing support and managed services maintain a sustained focus on capturing long-term value, ensuring EPRs deliver beyond the initial rollout.
3. Unclear accountability: Without clearly defined owners, progress can stall, leaving benefits unrealised. Nordic’s approach emphasises assigning dedicated clinical and operational leads to drive accountability, significantly boosting engagement and ownership across teams.
4. Measurement gaps: Inconsistent or unclear key performance indicators (KPIs) make it difficult to track progress effectively. Nordic’s data-driven methodologies standardise metrics such as error rates, system utilisation, and portal engagement, providing clear, reliable evaluation frameworks to demonstrate impact.
5. Operational pressures: Immediate service demands and regulatory complexities, such as data privacy compliance, can divert attention from benefits realisation. Nordic’s tailored frameworks navigate these challenges, ensuring secure, equitable outcomes while keeping benefits on track.

By proactively addressing these barriers, benefits realisation minimises risks and maximises returns, transforming challenges into opportunities for long lasting EPR success.

How to make benefits realisation work

Nordic integrates benefits realisation into every EPR project, drawing on our leading expertise to deliver results. Key principles include:

1. Align with strategy: Define benefits that support strategic priorities, such as improving patient outcomes, increasing operational efficiency, reducing costs, or enhancing staff and patient experience.
2. Define and own benefits early: Develop a benefits register during planning, assigning clear owners to establish accountability from procurement to rollout.
3. Track with precision: Agree on baselines, data sources, and KPIs pre-go-live, such as system utilisation (>85% log-in frequency), documentation efficiency (<24 hours for chart completion), or patient engagement (>50% portal usage). Track progress consistently, with transparency for executives and boards.
4. Integrate with change management: Tie benefits to training and communications to motivate staff, linking system use to workflow improvements and reducing resistance, as Nordic’s change management experts facilitate.
5. Continuous review and optimisation: Embed benefits tracking into ongoing operational reporting. Benefits frameworks should evolve with organisations, reflecting new priorities and opportunities for improvement.

A roadmap to maturity

Benchmark your progress with Nordic’s four-stage maturity model:

This model provides a roadmap from ambition → measurement → accountability → sustainable value, helping organisations ensure digital investments deliver impact.

Key areas for impact

Focus on high-value domains to maximise EPR benefits:

• Clinical quality and safety: Reduce medication errors by 46% with alerts and improve care coordination.
• Workforce productivity: Save ~25 of administrative time, boost satisfaction scores above ~65%.
• Patient experience: Achieve >35% portal engagement, reduce wait times to <15 minutes.
• Financial performance: Mature EPRs drive 2–3% productivity gains, lowering costs through optimised workflows and reduced duplicates.
• Future-readiness: Deliver high-quality, shareable data to power AI driven insights and analytics to achieve 70% full interoperability.

Why act now?

Benefits realisation delivers:

• Maximum value: Ensures investment translates into tangible improvements.
• Risk mitigation: Prevents underuse and ensures systems deliver as promised.
• Drive engagement: Motivates users with clear wins, enhancing adoption.
• Future-proofing digital strategy: Builds foundations for AI, analytics, and innovation.

In a competitive healthcare landscape, benefits realisation sets transformative EPR programs apart. 

Get started today

Don’t let your EPR investment fall short. Take these steps with Nordic’s support:

1. Define benefits and assign owners now.
2. Set KPIs and track relentlessly.
3. Embed benefits in training and governance.
4. Commit to continuous optimisation.

In my experience, even the best systems fail to deliver unless benefits are defined, owned, and tracked from day one. Our role is not just to implement technology, but to ensure it creates real, measurable impact for patients, clinicians, and the organisation as a whole.

-Aysha Ahmad, Implementation Director at Nordic