Lorenzo live at two more trusts

Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust went live with CSC’s Lorenzo electronic patient record yesterday, replacing its existing Patient Care system also provided by CSC.

Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust also went live with Lorenzo last month.

A spokesperson for Hull and East Yorkshire told Digital Health News the EPR went live in the emergency department at Hull Royal Infirmary on Sunday evening and was rolled out across the rest of the trust from 9am yesterday morning. 

"We are the first trust in England to simultaneously go live with the core patient record and electronic requesting and resulting trust-wide. We’d like to thank all staff for their patience, support and cooperation during both the preparation and implementation phases," the spokesperson said.

“We trust this system will deliver significant benefits for both patients and clinicians alike.”

The trust originally intended to go live with Lorenzo in September 2014, but pushed the date back to April this year to ensure the deployment was safe.

The go-live was further delayed to June 6, with a spokesperson for the trust telling Digital Health News they were waiting on a “few last little tweaks” on the side of CSC. 

Board papers from May say there was a “push in the last few weeks to ensure all clinicians were trained”, while a dry run of the go-live took place on the weekend of 23 May and had “gone well”.

The deployment of Lorenzo also allows the trust to work on implementing the Nervecentre electronic observations software, which it signed a deal for in March last year after receiving £950,000 from the nursing technology fund.

The May board papers say a pilot of the e-observations system will start in the second quarter of this year.

Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals made its decision to go with Lorenzo at the start of 2013, making use of central funding provided by the Department of Health to support trusts in the North, Midlands and East of England that want to implement Lorenzo.

The fund was set up after the break-up of the National Programme for IT, which originally intended for CSC to install Lorenzo at every trust in the NME, but was halted after trusts experienced serious problems implementing the system. This led to a renegotiated contract that included the opportunity for central investment for trusts if they could provide a compelling business case.

Mental health trust Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust also used central funds to go-live with Lorenzo on 18 May. This implementation had also been delayed from April.

A spokesperson from CSC said: "It's great to be working with Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals and Norfolk and Suffolk..

“Both of the trusts have ambitious plans to use the latest technology to help their staff dramatically transform the way they deliver care.”

The two trusts join several in the NME region that have already gone live with Lorenzo after receiving government money, including; Barnsley Hospital; Derby Hospitals; George Eliot; Ipswich Hospital; South Warwickshire; Tameside Hospital; and Walsall Healthcare.

Both Warrington and Halton Hospitals and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trusts are planning to go-live with the system by the end of the year.