A contingency plan is being developed alongside the current build of the Enterprise Patient Administration System (EPAS) for the new Royal Adelaide Hospital (nRAH) that would see some legacy clinical software retained and a hybrid paper/electronic medical record used should EPAS not be ready in time for the hospital's opening next year.

A report tabled in the South Australian Parliament last week by SA auditor-general Andrew Richardson shows that despite a stabilisation phase being implemented by SA Health to fix some of the issues plaguing the roll-out of EPAS, more delays have been experienced including in the deployment of version 14.3 of the software from December 2014 until May this year.

Version 14.3 was meant to fix many of the bugs – from billing problems to lack of clinical usability – that have caused a massive reduction in the initial scope of the roll-out of EPAS.