Joe Teape, CEO, Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust 

On Friday 3 April 2026, clinicians at Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust logged into a system that had not been there the day before. According to the trust, hundreds of separate applications had been brought together in a single Epic electronic patient record, covering hospital and community services. Alongside it came MY CARE, a new portal giving patients access to their information. The launch date may have been marked in the diary for months, but the real test began the following Monday: full clinic lists, a busy emergency department and staff getting to grips with screens and processes that had replaced familiar ways of working.

The starting point matters. In the latest national digital maturity rankings, the trust's acute and community services both scored 1.5 out of five, placing them at the bottom of the table. The strongest acute trusts scored 3.6. Epic offers a relatively quick route to a different position. The supplier brings an established product, an implementation model already tested elsewhere and the experience of a neighbouring trust that has been using the system for years. Royal Devon University Healthcare introduced Epic in east Devon in 2020 and north Devon in 2022. University Hospitals Plymouth followed in July 2026. Three trusts now share a single record, a significant change for patients moving between Exeter, Torquay and Derriford. Clinicians should no longer have to ring another hospital simply to find out what medication a patient has been prescribed.

That shared record is also a practical requirement for the neighbourhood health service promised by ministers. The 10-Year Health Plan sets out a shift from analogue to digital and from hospital to community. Neither will get very far if a district nurse, hospital consultant and care coordinator are all working from different versions of the same patient's history. Forty-three sites were named in the first national programme, with a further six trailblazer sites sharing £1.5m. That is a modest sum for a programme expected to change how care is delivered. Torbay's digital programme follows the same broad direction, although it does not form part of those funded schemes. That distinction could become important when the initial funding ends and trusts are left to meet the ongoing costs.

The trust's chief executive, Joe Teape, had made the case for Epic as part of this wider shift well before the system went live. Writing in July 2025, he linked the One Devon electronic patient record to the government's three priorities: moving care from hospitals into communities, replacing paper-based processes with digital services and placing greater emphasis on prevention. He argued that Torbay and South Devon was well placed to contribute, pointing to its existing digital work, voluntary-sector partnerships and integrated acute, community and social care teams. By October, he was setting out more plainly what the new record was expected to fix. Separate systems meant patients repeating their medical histories and staff spending time chasing information between services. Under Epic, GPs, hospital doctors, nurses, therapists and social workers should be able to work from the same up-to-date record. Teape said the change should mean fewer delays, less paperwork, quicker decisions and more time for staff to spend with patients. Those are clear commitments, and the trust should be judged against them.

The figures published by the trust make for encouraging reading. It reports that 46,000 patients have enrolled on MY CARE, 800 of its 1,000 Copilot licences have been deployed and 405 staff have completed digital skills training. An AI scribe for the emergency department is also progressing through information governance. These figures show how far the programme has spread, but they reveal little about what has changed for patients or staff. Has anyone waited less time? Are patients being discharged sooner? Are clinicians spending fewer hours completing records and more time providing care? Teape has already highlighted operational improvements that offer a useful picture of the trust before Epic arrived. In February 2026, he praised staff for improving theatre productivity, checking waiting lists and making additional outpatient appointments available. The trust reported that 67.5 per cent of patients were being treated within 18 weeks, with more than 1,000 extra outpatient appointments created through changes to clinic templates. These are worthwhile developments, but they came before Epic's April launch and should not be credited to the new system. The question now is whether the record can help the trust go further.

Experience elsewhere in the NHS suggests that activity can fall in the months after a new electronic patient record is introduced. Staff need time to learn unfamiliar workflows, and routine tasks can take longer while teams adjust. Any productivity gains tend to arrive later, and not every department sees them at the same pace. Trust boards celebrating the number of licences issued in the first year may find those figures rather less impressive when they come to assess the system three years later.

Policymakers face a similar problem. A digital maturity score is relatively easy to improve through capital investment and a procurement decision. A higher figure will look good in a departmental report. Demonstrating that the investment has improved care in hospitals and communities is considerably harder. Trade reporting has raised questions about what happens to the first wave of neighbourhood health funding as the programme comes to an end. If the centre cannot set out what comes next, trusts that have invested in local systems to support a national ambition could find themselves carrying the running costs without the promised backing.

There are also questions around procurement. Having three Devon trusts on the same supplier gives the county a level of interoperability it has struggled to achieve for decades. It also puts that supplier in a powerful position when contracts come up for renewal or trusts want to introduce new modules. Smaller health-tech companies may find that getting their products into Devon's clinical workflows means working through Epic's own tools and marketplace. Some will consider that worthwhile; others may decide the barriers are too high. The emergency department AI scribe pilot will provide an early indication of how the trust approaches this. If the technology comes from the platform provider, implementation may be simpler, but the trust could have less choice. Information governance approval will determine how quickly the pilot progresses. Patients, meanwhile, should be told clearly what is being recorded, how their information is used and where it is held.

Teape's wider digital ambitions provide another way to judge whether the programme is changing care beyond the hospital record. He has pointed to the trust's MyRecovery app, which had supported more than 100 people preparing for or recovering from hip and knee surgery by October 2025. He has also highlighted work involving remote monitoring, virtual appointments and virtual reality for chronic pain. These projects show that the trust is exploring how technology might change the way patients receive care, rather than concentrating solely on how their information is stored. But each initiative needs to prove its worth. Patients should be able to see whether access has improved, whether their experience has become easier and whether the technology is making a meaningful difference to their treatment. The trust must also show how these developments fit together, rather than allowing a collection of adoption figures to tell the whole story.

For NHS leaders, the lesson is fairly straightforward: publish measures of patient care alongside figures for system adoption, and do it before the first anniversary. Waiting times and discharge delays would provide a clearer picture of performance. So would the time clinicians spend maintaining records and the proportion of community referrals visible across organisations. Patients using MY CARE will make their own judgement. They will want test results to appear promptly and mistakes in their records to be corrected without a struggle. They are unlikely to be impressed by a dashboard showing how many people have registered.

Torbay has taken on the difficult task of replacing fragmented systems with a single record, and that achievement deserves recognition. The harder work starts now. Over the next two years, the trust's digital maturity score will be reassessed, while its waiting lists, discharge times and staff retention will offer a more revealing picture of progress. For Teape, who has publicly argued that Epic should reduce delays, improve coordination and give clinicians more time to care for patients, the system must now deliver against those promises. If the trust moves up from its score of 1.5 while patients are seen sooner and staff spend less time chasing information, it will have a compelling case for the investment. If the score improves and little else changes, the achievement will look considerably thinner.