Morecambe runs Lorenzo in A&E

University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust has put Lorenzo live at one of its emergency departments.

The electronic patient record, supplied by CSC as part of the National Programme for IT in the NHS, replaced iSoft’s i.PM system at Furness General Hospital’s emergency department in the early hours of this morning.

Steve Fairclough, head of health informatics at the trust, said: “We have been working hard with our doctors, nurses and support staff to make sure that Lorenzo works the way we want it to and the implementation of the system in the emergency departments will help us to offer a better service to our patients.

“With the launch of any new computer system, you expect to encounter teething problems that only appear after go-live.

“We have a team of people on site who are appropriately equipped and experienced to both identify and fix any that may appear. I am confident in Lorenzo and also in my team who are working around the clock to implement it.”

Morecambe Bay was the first acute and most high profile of the ‘early adopters’ of Lorenzo, the system that CSC was supposed to deploy across the North, Midlands and East of England, as part of NPfIT.

The trust gave the system a ‘soft landing’ with a pilot at Furness General Hospital in 2008. It put the version that includes a patient administration system, Release 1.9, live across the majority of its wards and departments in June 2010.

The trust initially experienced significant problems with the system, but has since stabilised it and started to extend its use.

The module that has been installed in Furness General Hospital’s emergency department has been designed specifically for the emergency care environment.

The trust chose to put it live in the early hours of a Tuesday, because relatively few patients are in the department at that time.

The trust’s chief executive, Eric Morton, said in a statement that there might be some delays for patients booking in at the reception desk, but it had extra staff on hand to minimise any disruption.

“We have learned a lot from the implementation of the system across the rest of the hospitals and have put more support staff on hand to ensure that any delay to patients is as short as it possibly can be,” he said.

The emergency department at Royal Lancaster Infirmary will start to use the new Lorenzo module in the next few weeks, and Morton indicated the trust remains committed to the project.

“Lorenzo enables the sharing of information across our hospitals, meaning that patient care becomes more personal and safer – both of which are paramount priorities for us.”