Lorenzo ‘winning business on merit’

Lorenzo is “probably more perfect” than other patient administration systems in the UK market, CSC’s UK healthcare lead, Philippe Houssiau, has said.

Speaking to EHI about managing three successful go-lives of the electronic patient record system in a couple of months, Houssiau said that Lorenzo has been “lifted out of the box”, and the company is now “deploying the system on the merit of the system itself.”

“To me, Lorenzo is one of the most robust and homegrown PASs in the UK market. It is by no means perfect, but it’s probably more perfect than other systems that are around,” said Houssiau.

“It’s been developed specifically for this market and with the level of specificity that’s required in a local setting. We’re proud that we have this system available for the market.”

CSC was contracted to deploy Lorenzo to all trusts in the North, Midlands and East of England as part of the National Programme for IT.

However, iSoft, which was bought by CSC in 2011, struggled with the development of the system, which became subject to serious deployment delays.  

The government and CSC eventually signed an interim deal that removed the company’s exclusive rights to provide IT systems to the NME, but made central funding available to trusts that still wanted to take it.

That deal was finalised in October last year and Houssiau said he is very happy with the way the company is now working together with the Department of Health and the Health and Social Care Information Centre.

“Where in the past it’s been much more negotiation type of mode, we are now all sharing the same type of goal: we want this to be a success for the benefit of patients,” he said.

The first go-live under the revised deal was Tameside Hospital NHS Trust in October last year. In the first months of 2014, three deployments followed at Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust, Derby Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and Walsall healthcare NHS Trust.

All of these appear to have gone smoothly. Houssiau, who joined CSC from Alliance Medical in 2013, having previously been on the board of Agfa Gavaert and president of Agfa's healthcare business group, put this down to focusing on a “holistic leadership programme” and driving change.

“The key success is with the trust leadership. It’s about anticipating the level of change and really monitor the temperature and be on top of the change,” he said.

Another contributory factor to its current success, he said, is that the company is learning from past experiences and has developed a good way of exchanging best practice between Lorenzo sites to improve the system.

“It’s really transformed the level of information in having a learning system that can adapt to the local requirements.”

The DH expects up to 22 trusts to take Lorenzo under the revised deal, which expires in 2016. So far, nine trusts have signed up.

Houssiau said he was not focused on the final figure, but: “We hope to make, say 22, and I think as far as we’re concerned we don’t think there are any obstacles in achieving that.”

The company is also looking at winning contracts outside its LSP regions, and it hopes to announce a contract win this financial year.

“We’re now being approached by trusts outside the region to start talking about Lorenzo,” said Houssiau.

“We have strong ambitions to have a number of deployments outside the contract as well. We haven’t signed any agreement outside the NHS contract yet but we are coming quite close.”