Cohen: 25 trusts to get Lorenzo in 2010

The head of ISoft has said 25 NHS trusts will go live with the company's 'strategic' electronic patient record, Lorenzo, next year.

Speaking via a telephone link to E-Health Insider Live ’09, iSoft executive chairman and chief executive Gary Cohen said he was confident that Lorenzo Regional Care (Release 1.9) would go live across University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust by next March.

This spring, director general of informatics Christine Connelly said she wanted to see Lorenzo “working smoothly” across an acute trust by March, having gone live in another setting by the end of November.

NHS Bury met the November deadline, and Cohen said he was sure Morecambe Bay would be ready on time.

He said staff from the trust, the company and local service provider CSC were about to go out to iSoft’s development centre in Chennai to see and run tests on the product.

“More than 25 trusts will be scheduled to go live with Lorenzo Regional Care in 2010,” he added.

Cohen featured in a video presentation about Lorenzo, in which he ran through its architecture and some of the releases planned for the NHS.

He said Release 2 – or ‘clinicals’ – had been released to CSC and that Release 3 would be released to the LSP next year.

He said that customers would be able to use Lorenzo Studio to develop their own applications and adaptations.

And he announced that Lorenzo Primary Care would be launched next year, for sale direct to the NHS. CSC is due to take a version of Lorenzo for primary care in its areas at Release 4.

In response to a question from session chair and E-Health Insider editor Jon Hoeksma about what made Lorenzo “sizzle”, Cohen said it was its web-based, distributed architecture on which customers could add the functionality they needed.

He claimed the hosted nature of Lorenzo made it suitable for smaller organisations who could not build or maintain their own IT infrastructures, and that it would save larger organisations “millions and millions of pounds.”

“Some features others will copy, and on some features Lorenzo will catch up,” he said. “But the technology is where we stand apart from the competition and what is available in the rest of the world.”