North Bristol live with Lorenzo

North Bristol NHS Trust has become the first trust in the south of England to go live with the computer system Lorenzo.

A spokesperson for the trust confirmed that roll out for the electronic patient record began on Thursday night and continued over the weekend.

The system went live in the trust’s emergency department on Sunday morning, while Lorenzo and the theatres module, Galaxy, were switched on in emergency theatres soon afterwards.

Selected inpatient wards went live throughout the day on Sunday and the remaining wards, elective theatres and outpatients are due to go live today.

The whole trust, which has several hospitals in the Bristol area and provides both acute and community services, is expected to be live and working with Lorenzo by Tuesday.

The spokesperson added: “Over the course of the weekend, we have had a dedicated command centre running 24/7 to oversee the implementation and teams deployed across the hospital to assist staff as the rollout took place.

“This support will remain in place over the coming days and weeks as we all get used to the new system.

“We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all trust staff and the IT team for working so effectively together to deliver a successful roll-out.”

Lorenzo is delivered to North Bristol on a hosted, software-as-a-service model and replaces the trust’s previous EPR Cerner Millennium, which the trust received as one of three 'greenfield' sites towards the end of the National Programme for IT.

North Bristol originally intended to go live with its new EPR on 16 October but put the implementation back by a month to make sure  the trust was ready to make the switch.

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

The plan is to implement Lorenzo in a two stage process, the first stage of which involves replacing everything currently done with Cerner Millennium. This includes implementing a new patient administration system, A&E system, and order communications.

Once this is done, North Bristol will focus on stopping paper generation by getting clinical staff to input information electronically.

Priestman added that whatever systems are retained or replaced at North Bristol, Lorenzo will become the interface through which all patient information will be accessed, acting like a portal.

In July 2014 North Bristol became the first NHS trust in the south of England to agree to take Lorenzo as part of an open procurement process.

Several trusts in the North, Midlands and East are already using the system, including some that received it under NPfIT when CSC was the local service provider for the region.

A revised contract between the company and the Department of Health allows trusts in the NME to request central funding to implement Lorenzo. So far, eleven business cases have been approved.

This option does not exist for trusts outside the NME, meaning that North Bristol has had to fund the project with local investment.

A spokesperson from CSC said: “It’s great news that North Bristol NHS Trust has successfully gone live with Lorenzo. North Bristol was the first trust to take the product outside of the terms of CSC’s central agreement with the NHS, and is the largest trust in the South West, so this is a major endorsement for the system.”