EPR delayed by data migration problems

Data migration problems have forced North Bristol NHS Trust to delay the go-live of its Lorenzo electronic patient record.

The trust planned to transfer to the system on 16 October, but decided to delay implementation on 9 October.

The issue is with migrating referral to treatment data onto the new EPR and the trust says it will not roll-out CSC’s Lorenzo until this is resolved.

“Ensuring a smooth change over with as little impact on staff, patients and the running of the hospital has been our number one priority, which is why we have made this difficult but important decision,” a trust statement says.

“Our IT team is now working hard to determine a new go-live date.”

Digital Health understands the trust is hoping to go-live within the next fortnight, but other sources say it could be as late as the end of November. It is due to roll-out the Lorenzo patient administration system, A&E and order communications in the first phase.

North Bristol was one of three ‘greenfield’ sites that received Cerner Millennium from BT in December 2011, under NPfIT in the South. It needs to move out of the BT data centre before the end of this month, when the national contract expires.

An independent review of the Millennium implementation published in 2012 said the trust went live before the outpatient or theatre builds were complete, sparking a “crisis” that took five months and £4.6m to resolve. Data migration was also highlighted as an issue at the time.

The trust decided to switch to a different EPR in the middle of last year. It is the first trust in the South of England to take Lorenzo, which will be delivered on a hosted software-as-a-service model, and was the first NHS trust to buy it from CSC in an open procurement.

Previous installations have been nationally procured and in the North Midlands and East regions of what was the National Programme for IT.

The trust’s interim head of IT Ward Priestman told Digital Health News in May that the Lorenzo functionality would be rolled out over five months from October, with the aim of becoming 95% ‘paper-lite’ by March 2016.

September board papers say a dress rehearsal was planned for 18 September. The implementation had been scrutinised and key issues related to the finalisation of the standard operating procedures and the training of staff to use the new system, they say.