Sheffield to spend £33m on Lorenzo

Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has become the tenth trust to sign up to take the Lorenzo electronic patient record system from CSC and estimates the project will cost £33m over ten years.

The trust, which plans to go live at the end of 2015, submitted a business case to the Health and Social Care Information centre's CSC LSP Programme Board, which has been approved.  It expects the project will deliver a return on investment of 3.3.

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, the company struggled with the development of the system, which became subject to serious deployment delays.

This led to the government and CSC signing a revised 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. Including Sheffield, ten trusts have signed up to use the deal.

Dr Rhona MacLean, consultant haematologist and one of the clinical leads for the project, said in a statement that the trust plans to be paper-lite by 2018.

“The new system will eventually include the ability to do electronic prescribing which will reduce errors due to handwritten prescriptions, flag up any reasons why the patient cannot have a certain drug and also enable quicker turnaround of prescriptions and discharge from hospital,” she added.

According to the trust’s board papers, the full cost of the system over ten years will be £33m and the trust is seeking £13m in funding from the DH.

“Benefits to the value of £70m have been identified, of which £45m are cash releasing. This makes the project self-funding over the ten year project lifecycle,” say the board papers.

“These benefits and values have been derived by use of the HSCIC benefits calculation tool (BART) and are currently in validation with the trust directorates. Taking into account the costs and benefits detailed the return on investment is 3.33.”

The EPR project is part of a wider, five year ‘Transformation Through Technology Programme’, which also includes a clinical portal and an electronic data management system.

The trust’s business case for its clinical portal estimates that the capital cost of its eight-year clinical portal project will be £8.1m, with non-recurrent revenue costs at £1.4m and recurrent revenue costs, excluding capital charges sit at £3.4m In total, the trust says the lifecycle capital charges are £8.5m.

It expects a return on investment of 4.2, with £60m in benefits, £10m of which are cash-releasing.

The EDMS part of the project also includes a scanning service provider and the trust estimates the capital costs of the eight year project is £3.1m, the non-recurrent revenue costs are £2.2m and the recurrent revenue costs are £13m. The trust has applied to NHS England’s Integrated Digital Care Fund for £8.4m to help cover the costs of the clinical portal and EDMS part of the project

Dr David Throssell, the trust’s medical director said that over the course of the five year project the trust plans to spend £35m on improving its IT.

“We are a trailblazer in so many areas thanks to the innovation and dedication of our clinical and non-clinical colleagues across hospital and community care. However this is often hindered rather than helped by some of the IT systems which we have had for many years,” he said.

“But we don't want to just update, we want to transform our organisation into one which has cutting edge systems to support the transformation in care we want and need to deliver over coming years.”

He added that the current PatientCentre PAS does not allow the trust to join up records. “One example of this is that currently a patient’s records are mainly paper based and can be located across numerous places in our hospitals or in community health services,” he said.

Philippe Houssiau, CSC’s UK vice president of healthcare, said: “We are honoured to be working with Sheffield Teaching Hospitals, enabling technology that will be at the heart of an integrated care initiative embracing all 15,500 staff and improving outcomes for patients across the city.

“CSC’s Lorenzo will be a foundation component for the hospital’s ‘Transformation Through Technology programme’, but we’re aiming to go well beyond simply delivering an EPR.”