Birmingham Women's pauses Lorenzo

Birmingham Women’s NHS Foundation Trust has ‘paused’ implementation of Lorenzo as it re-assesses the system’s benefits.

The trust was the third ‘early adopter’ to take the iSoft electronic patient record software from CSC as part of the National Programme for IT in the NHS, and went live with the care management and clinical documents modules in 2010.

A trust spokesperson has now told eHealth Insider it is delaying implementation of the requests and results module. “We have taken a short pause on requests and results to re-evaluate the benefits of the product.”

However, the spokesperson said the trust was looking to have the module go live next year, regardless of the outcome of the re-evaluation.

It is also working on implementing the care plans module of the system, which is expected to be completed early next year.

Birmingham Women’s has stayed relatively quiet on the performance of Lorenzo since going live with Release 1.9 in 2010.

However, a review of CSC’ contract for the North Midlands and East of England by the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority suggested the trust had issues with it.

The heavily redacted report said the trust was refusing to sign off on the deployment verification criteria because of disagreements over performance.

Recent board papers also show the trust is having issues with integrating Lorenzo with other clinical systems.

It has just completed the implementation of an electronic maternity management system from K2 Medical Systems across pregnancy and neonatology.

However, it has struck difficulties with integrating the two systems because patients’ NHS Numbers are not transferring from Lorenzo to the maternity system.

This has meant that midwives have to manually enter the NHS Number. The issue has been added to the trust’s risk report as ‘extreme’.

The trust is also looking at bringing forward improvements to its IT, including an upgrade of its wireless infrastructure, because of the scheduled roll out of Lorenzo care plans, which will entail clinicians using the system at the patient’s bedside.

It is now in the process of procuring a wireless infrastructure provider, and would also be looking to upgrade other elements of its IT – expected to cost approximately £250,000.