Lorenzo - slow progress at Morecambe Bay

University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust is yet to go-live with Lorenzo Release 1 at the Lancaster Royal Infirmary, more than a year after it originally planned to do so.

The trust is still working on the deployment of Lorenzo R1 at Furness General Hospital. However, it says that all surgical services are now live with the electronic patient record system from iSoft, which is being implemented by CSC under the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

In a statement, Steve Fairclough, head of informatics at the trust told E-Health Insider: “We’re making steady progress with Lorenzo and have been through a period of consolidation and expansion.

“Lorenzo now extends to all surgical services at Furness General Hospital and includes the ability to produce an operation notes that can be references as part of the discharge process.”

Morecambe Bay gave Lorenzo R1 a ‘soft landing’ on a medical ward at Furness General in November 2008, after a series of delays. At the time, the trust said it was planning to extend the implementation to a surgical ward at The Royal Lancaster Infirmary.

The trust then decided to start the surgical ward implementation at Furness General instead. In June last year, it said it would extend to Lancaster when two more surgical wards were up and running.

At the time, Fairclough said: “We now have enough scope to show the benefits of Lorenzo in different areas. We expect to run the scope for six to eight weeks in the third ward, so we can learn lessons, possibly re-engineer and decide whether the time is right to move to Lancaster.”

According to the trust, the project was then discussed with consultants and CSC. Rather than rolling out Lorenzo to another site, a decision was made to extend its scope to cover, for example, the provision of operating notes directly from theatres.

In April 2009, Department of Health chief information officer Christine Connelly set deadlines for the national programme’s local service providers, CSC and BT, to make ‘significant progress’ with getting Lorenzo and Cerner Millennium into acute trusts.

She said that Lorenzo Release 1.9 would need to be live in “any care setting” by November 2009 and “on track for implementation at an acute trust by March 2010.” NHS Bury went live with R 1.9 in November. The acute trust mentioned is believed to be Morecambe Bay.

In a statement provided to EHI, George Nasmyth, a consultant at the trust who has been using Lorenzo to write operation notes, said: “Not only can the results of all investigations be accessed through a common IT portal, but all clinical notes are available and can be used to develop discharge communications.”

He added: “Clearly, with any new system there will be a need to modify and improve the configuration to meet specific end-user demands. Whilst the ‘off the shelf package’ is not perfect, we are very privileged to have the opportunity to be leading the primary development of these systems and configuring them for general use.”

Morecambe Bay said it is now in the process of finalising the deployment plan for the rest of the trust.

Links: iSoft

CSC