Lorenzo live at North Bristol in October

North Bristol NHS Trust will go-live with its Lorenzo electronic patient record system on 18 October.

The trust plans to switch off its Cerner Millennium system on 16 October and revert to paper for two days before switching Lorenzo on.

North Bristol 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.

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

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

The first stage involves replacing everything currently done with Cerner Millennium, which is primarily the patient administration system, A&E and order communications. The second phase – called clinical 1 – is about stopping paper generation by getting clinical staff to input information electronically.

North Bristol also plans to do e-prescribing and has the option of taking the Lorenzo product, but will assess that against other specialty systems at the time, explained Priestman.

More pressingly it must replace its maternity system and will again assess the Lorenzo module against others in the market before making a decision.

Priestman says that whatever systems are retained or replaced, Lorenzo will become the interface through which all patient information will be accessed, almost like a portal.

“The big things is about stopping generating paper using Lorenzo,” he explains.

“We’re really going to push the product as far as we can. There’s a lot of innovation around forms and how we use the system to capture data.”

A dedicated team is working out how processes currently operate and how these can be streamlined in an electronic environment. This means that eight forms now used in A&E will become two and the seven or eight specialty surgical referral forms will become one.

The trust has a team of medical information officers and nursing information officers who have part of their time dedicated to IT projects. Also, more than 200 people have volunteered to be ‘Lorenzo champions’ and will be the super users of the new system.

Read more about North Bristol's EPR plans in Insight.