Morecambe 18 months from Lorenzo EPR

Lorenzo is within 18-months of being a full electronic patient record offering a best in class system to NHS trusts.

That is according to the team from University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust that has been working with the system for more than four years.

In an exhaustive briefing on the implementation of Lorenzo R1.9 at the Cumbrian and North Lancashire trust, the senior team behind the project said it was 70% of the way to being a fully-implemented EPR.

Lorenzo is also the foundation for the trust’s ambitious eHospital strategy, which is designed to make the organisation fully paperless and integrated with the wider health economy.

A marker to the future, and a key feature of Lorenzo already widely in use, are immediate discharge summaries, detailing patients’ treatment and medications, which are sent electronically to GPs.

Steve Fairclough, the head of health informatics at the trust, told eHealth Insider: “We’re not far off having a full EPR.”

Morecambe Bay gave Lorenzo a ‘soft landing’ in 2008, and went on to implement Release 1.9 – which includes a patient administration system – in 2010.

The implementation ran into numerous issues, but more than 4,500 staff are now trained on the system, with up to 1,500 users per day accessing it using smart cards.

Fairclough told EHI that people’s assumptions about what they know about Lorenzo bears little relationship to reality.

“We run monthly NHS events and when people first come in they smile, but by the end they are impressed by what we’ve done.”

In 2011, the trust suffered a melt-down on outpatient waits, which saw 19,000 patients, including cancer patients, waiting longer than they should have done.

However, the team says this was down to processes and management; Dr Colin Brown, the clinical lead on the Lorenzo project, says the new EPR has actually helped clear the backlog.

Morecambe Bay is the key, acute reference site for Lorenzo, the system that CSC was contracted to deliver across the North, Midlands and East of England as part of the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

Dr Brown admits to past frustrations about how long developments have taken, and the bureaucracy of NPfIT.

However, he says a key change has been that the trust now has a direct relationship with CSC. “Under NPfIT things just took too long, we’re much more agile now.”

Read the extended EHI Insight feature article for full details of the project.