Humber halts Lorenzo deployments

Humber NHS Foundation Trust has stopped all significant roll-outs of Lorenzo while it tackles issues with its electronic patient record system.

The trust went live with CSC’s EPR in May last year.

A report to the trust board this month details several difficulties, including user support issues, which are causing the Lorenzo deployment schedule to “slip”.

“The current mental health minimum data set, care programme approach and users support issues need to be resolved before further significant Lorenzo deployments are carried out,” it says.

According to the report, CSC has carried out tests of the mental health minimum data set fixes.

“This has created additional issues with the processing of the referral table. CSC is now carrying out a root cause analysis of the changes to see if they can correct the new problem,” the report says.

It adds that feedback from operational teams highlighted concerns around IT equipment and system speed. To deal with this, the trust is holding a series of feedback meetings starting in May.

“They will be across operational and corporate services to gain feedback on the informatics services to identify improvements that can be provided to the organisation,” says the report.

Jules Williams, Humber’s deputy director of infrastructure and informatics, said the trust and CSC were working in a "very strong, effective and successful partnership to implement Lorenzo".

“All major change programmes have challenges and risks and Humber’s ‘Better Together’ change programme is no different.

"The Lorenzo element of the ‘Better together’ programme is a complex piece of work that the trust and CSC are working on collectively to ensure that the trust’s patients receive the best quality of care.

"Where there have been any issues, this coordinated approach has led to positive outcomes and resolution,” she added. 

The mental health trust is the fourth early adopter of Lorenzo as part of CSC’s local service provider contract for the North Midlands and East of England under NPfIT.

In February, Humber became the first to deploy CSC’s Day Care Management module to serve teams across the trust’s child and adolescent mental health service and early intervention in psychosis.

Despite the difficulties, the report says that good progress is being made on some Lorenzo projects, particularly regarding optimisation and super user training.

It adds that the trust is also making progress with performance reporting, but that “in the short and medium term, this is increasing the work load on the information management department.”