Salisbury goes live with Lorenzo

Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust went live with the Lorenzo electronic patient record over the weekend.

A spokesman for the trust confirmed on Monday that the EPR, from supplier CSC, had been deployed, but did not provide further details.

In board papers from 3 October, the acute trust said the transition would start with migration off its old iPM patient administration system, followed by A&E, and inpatient and outpatient areas.

The board was told a “dress rehearsal” had been run and the deployment team “had been working closely with staff across the trust to move information, test systems and carry out training."

It was also told that Lorenzo would replace a mix of paper and electronic records with a “new system which will hold health records electronically in one secure place and ensure that staff have faster and easier access to the right level of information to look after their patients."

A progress report presented to the same meeting indicated that while the Lorenzo project was mostly on-track, there were some concerns about interoperability with other systems, tests and results, and data warehousing.

Salisbury already uses the iPM patient administration system developed by iSoft, which was bought by CSC in 2011. It was one of the so-called iSoft 7 trusts that signed a deal with the company in 2006 to stick with their existing systems instead of becoming part of the National Programme for IT in the South.

The deal was later extended to 2016.  Salisbury picked Lorenzo in August last year, at which time it hoped to start its go-live this July, and then roll-out the system over two years.

Its deployment plan was to start with a first phase that included the PAS, order communications, A&E, clinical documentation and the data warehouse. 

A second phase was then scheduled to involve maternity, theatres, e-prescribing, an internal clinical portal and the introduction of a patient portal provided by a different supplier. 

The deployment at Salisbury is a key one for CSC, as it is one of the first times that the EPR has been deployed outside the North, Midlands and East of England, where CSC was the local service provider during the NPfIT-era.

Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust has also deployed a Lorenzo PAS. In the NME, in addition to the handful of trusts that deployed Lorenzo as part of NPfIT, an additional 15 trusts have picked, and in some cases deployed, Lorenzo under a post-NPfIT deal between CSC and the Department of Health.

Digital Health Intelligence: holds information on the clinical systems installed at trusts across the UK and uses this to calculate a Clinical Digital Maturity Index score. Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust had a score of 53 / 95 before its Lorenzo deployment and was ranked 149 / 152 (subscription / log-in required).