Bury formally accepts Lorenzo R1.9

NHS Bury has accepted iSoft’s electronic patient record system, three weeks after becoming the first NHS organisation to go-live with Lorenzo Regional Care Release 1.9.

Last week, E-Health Insider revealed that NHS Bury had set its own ‘local criteria’ to determine whether the implementation had been a success.

A board document said: “The project board will formally meet and determine whether Lorenzo Regional Care Release 1.9 meets the criteria 21 days after the go-live.”

It added that the project board would make a recommendation to the PCT’s interim chief executive, Dr Mike Burrows, about whether the system should be accepted or rejected.

It said the decision would then be reported to NHS Connecting for Health, which would feed it into a bigger decision on whether Lorenzo and Cerner Millennium have made the "significant progress" demanded in the acute sector.

NHS Bury’s criteria were split into four sections, considering whether Lorenzo supported its business processes; the availability and performance of system; user satisfaction; and impact on patient care.

In a statement, Ann Halpin, associate director of IM&T at NHS Bury told EHI: “On Tuesday 24 November, the NHS Bury Early Adopter Project Board met to consider whether the implementation of Lorenzo Regional Care has sufficiently met the success criteria set prior to the go-live.

“I can confirm that the trust accepts the system, and wishes to continue its use and engage in further system updates."

Responding to questions about rumoured problems around reporting, the trust said it had faced some small issues which it intends to resolve.

“As is to be expected with any early adopter deployment, there have been a number of manageable issues during the early life of the system. Many of these have either been resolved or will be resolved in the coming weeks,” Halpin added.

Around 600 clinical and administrative staff across 31 community services are now using the system to manage their administrative tasks including booking appointments, recording contacts and managing casenotes.

In April, director general of informatics Christine Connelly set deadlines for local service providers CSC and BT to achieve “significant” progress with the ‘strategic’ systems they are due to deliver under the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

She said that CSC must get iSoft’s Lorenzo into a care setting by November and “working smoothly” in an acute setting by March. Meanwhile, she said that BT must get Cerner’s Millennium into another acute trust by November.

Meeting the criteria set out by NHS Bury is a significant step. The next big set for Cerner is Kingston Hospital NHS Trust’s go-live with Millennium, which is due to happen this weekend.

Link: iSoft

CSC