East Midlands defers Lorenzo deployments

NHS East Midlands has decided to defer two of its three Lorenzo deployments for 2010 until next year.

The board paper shows that only Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust will implement Lorenzo, the strategic EPR system from iSoft that is due to be implemented by local service provider CSC under the National Programme for IT in the NHS. It is expected to go-live in May 2010.

The board papers, which were published in November 2009, state: “The strategic health authority is working with local health communities to identify the organisations and deployment dates for the period from June 2010 through to December 2010.

"Based on a modest capacity profile provided by the Lorenzo delivery team, it is unlikely that there will be any further East Midland organisations scheduled to go-live with Lorenzo systems in that period.”

The papers also indicate that Derbyshire Mental Health Services NHS Trust, which E-Health Insider revealed had scrapped its Lorenzo implementation following problems with its development, will be now one of the last trusts in the East Midlands to deploy; going live in 2013-14.

At the time, a spokesperson for the trust said it would continue using its CareNotes electronic patient record from Strand Technology until 2012.

Dave Marsden, chief information officer for NHS East Midlands, told EHI: “As regards deployments through to December 2010, Kettering is the only planned deployment of Lorenzo in the East Midlands in that period.

"We had originally planned to deploy to two primary care trusts that currently have CSC’s interim iPM PAS, but this has been deferred to 2011.”

Timetables show the trusts that will follow Kettering by going live in Q1 2011 are Derbyshire County Primary Care Trust, NHS Derby City, NHS Lincolnshire and NHS Northamptonshire. Two mental health trusts are scheduled to go live in the following quarter.

The board paper also says: “The overall deployments through to December 2010 are significantly lower than the contract anticipated.

"This is very disappointing in terms of the service developments that the new generation of software has been designed to support."

However, it adds that the implications are “not catastrophic” because the SHA’s original deployment schedule was quite cautious.

At E-Health Insider Live 2009 in November, Gary Cohen, the chair and chief executive of iSoft, said that 25 NHS trusts would be going live with Lorenzo in 2010. To EHI’s knowledge, no trust has gone live so far this year.

Link: NHS East Midlands Annual Strategic IM&T Report – NPfIT/Lorenzo update