Hull delays Lorenzo go-live until 2015

Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust has delayed the go-live of its Lorenzo electronic patient record system until April 2015.

The trust initially hoped to go-live with the EPR this month, but then pushed the go-live date back to November, before deciding on 27 April next year.

Another Lorenzo site, Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, was due to go live with the EPR from CSC this summer. However, it has delayed the go-live until October “in response to staff concerns” about training over the summer period.

Hull and East Yorkshire was the second trust to commit to taking the EPR under a revised agreement between the Department of Health and CSC, which was the local service provider for the North, Midlands and East of England under the National Programme for IT.

The agreement meant CSC was no longer the exclusive provider of healthcare IT systems to the area, but also provided trusts that still wanted Lorenzo with a way to access central funding.

A trust spokesman for Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals told EHI it has “rescheduled its deployment date” and worked hard with CSC and the Health and Social Care Information Centre “to ensure our deployment date is safe, and provides us with a system that meets our expectations.”

The trust’s June board minutes say problems “had been flagged up around local changes requested and mature equipment,” which meant it could not hit its September date.

Barnsley and Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals were due to be the fifth and sixth trusts to go live with Lorenzo this year, following Derby Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust, Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust, and George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust.

A spokesperson from CSC told EHI that “those trusts are deriving real benefits from the system.” They added: “We are working closely with all of the trusts currently taking Lorenzo to ensure that their go-lives are smooth.”

EHI reported in August last year that Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals plans to create a unified Lorenzo EPR with Humber NHS Foundation Trust, its neighbouring mental health trust, which was the first early adopter of the system in its sector.

The plan is for the two trusts to unite their patient databases in a single record for both acute and mental health.

However, with the acute trust not going live until April next year, and Humber’s current Lorenzo contract expiring in July 2016, this may not go ahead as quickly as planned. Instead, it may become part of a bigger integration project in the region.

Philippe Hossiau, CSC's UK healthcare lead, told EHI in April this year that the company has been working to win business “on merit” and it signed its first contract outside its NPfIT areas with North Bristol NHS Trust in July.  

South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust and Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust have also signed up to take the system.