Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust has signed a contract with The Access Group to replace its current electronic patient record system with Access Rio Evo, a platform designed specifically for mental health, community health, and paediatric services. The trust, which provides mental health and learning disability services across a large part of the north-east of England and North Yorkshire, expects the new system to be live by April 2027.

The contract represents one of the more significant digital infrastructure decisions made by a mental health trust in the region in recent years. The existing system has required staff to work across fragmented records in ways that create administrative burden and, in some cases, risk to clinical continuity.

What the new system is intended to do

Access Rio Evo is built around the concept of a unified patient record, pulling together information from different parts of a patient's care into a single view accessible to the clinical teams involved in their treatment. For a trust of TEWV's scale and complexity, where a patient may be seen across inpatient, community, and specialist services, that integration has direct implications for how safely and efficiently care can be coordinated.

Nick Black, chief information officer at TEWV, has described the move as part of a longer-term digital strategy rather than a straightforward software replacement. The trust's intention is to establish a platform capable of adapting as service models and clinical practices change, rather than procuring a system that will require replacement again within a short cycle. The emphasis on reliability and usability reflects a concern that poorly designed clinical systems can slow down the very workflows they are meant to support.

Clinical involvement in the build

The trust has confirmed that clinical staff are being consulted during the configuration of the system ahead of the go-live date. That approach is a response to a well-documented pattern in NHS digital deployments, where systems designed without adequate frontline input have required costly modifications after launch or have faced resistance from the staff expected to use them. Involving clinicians at this stage is intended to ensure the platform reflects how care is actually delivered, rather than how it appears in an organisational chart.

The paediatric and community health components of the system are relevant here. TEWV's patient population spans a wide range of needs and ages, and a record system that works well for acute mental health episodes but poorly for community follow-up or children's services would create new gaps even as it closed others.

Data sharing and the wider system

Beyond internal record management, the contract includes provision for data sharing across care settings and, in some contexts, with patients directly. Greater data visibility across organisational boundaries has become a central theme in NHS planning, particularly as integrated care systems are expected to take a more coordinated approach to population health. A trust that can share structured clinical data reliably with GPs, local authority social care teams, and other providers is better positioned to support the kind of early intervention that NHS policy has been moving towards.

The practical barriers to that kind of integration remain considerable. Data governance, consent frameworks, and technical compatibility with other systems all require careful management, and the ambition to share information across the health and care system has frequently outpaced the infrastructure available to support it. TEWV has not detailed which external organisations the system will initially connect with at go-live.

The wider context

TEWV has faced scrutiny in recent years over patient safety and governance, making the reliability of its clinical systems a matter of more than operational convenience. A record platform that gives clinicians clearer, faster access to a patient's history and current care plan has direct relevance to the trust's efforts to demonstrate improvement. Whether the new system delivers on that in practice will become clearer after April 2027, once it is operating at scale across the trust's services.