End in sight for Lorenzo at Bury

Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust has given the strongest indication yet that it will switch off Lorenzo at Bury’s community services.

In April last year, Pennine incorporated the community services arm of NHS Bury, which was the first ‘early adopter’ of Lorenzo; the IT system that CSC has been trying to install across the North, Midlands and East.

Pennine Care was itself supposed to be the fourth early adopter of the system. But it threw the National Programme for IT in the NHS into turmoil when it pulled out of the project last April, despite spending £3.2m preparing for the project.

The trust, which absorbed Bury along with a number of other community providers, subsequently announced that was taking part in a joint procurement for new systems for seven mental health trusts in the North West, led by NHS Shared Business Services.

A contract award notice indicates that four systems suppliers have been chosen for the framework deal – Ascribe, Civica, CSE Healthcare, and Strand Technology.

In response to questions from eHealth Insider, Pennine Care said it now “undertaking a mini-competition against an NHS framework to procure a suitable replacement system.”

Asked whether it would switch off Lorenzo at Bury, the trust told eHealth Insider: “It is our intention to procure and implement a single system which adequately supports the business needs of the trust across both mental health and community services.”

This would suggest that it will stop using the system. NHS Bury went live with Lorenzo Regional Care Release 1.9 in November 2009.

Six months later, in April 2010, the board of what was by then Community Services Bury, heard that it was still trying to “improve the operational stability of the system” and implement further functionality.

A year later, and shortly before becoming part of Pennine Care as part of the Transforming Community Services programme, the board was still hearing about “operational issues in using Lorenzo on a day to day basis.”

Despite this, Bury signed off on the first module of Lorenzo before being incorporated into Pennine Care.

But when Pennine Care withdrew from the national programme, plans to roll-out further clinical functionality were abandoned, as were deployments to other local community providers, who had banded together to support the new system.

The other trusts involved in the collaborative procurement are: Greater Manchester West Mental Health NHS Trust, 5 Boroughs Partnership NHS Trust, Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, Cumbria Partnership Mental Health NHS Trust, Mersey Care NHS Trust, and Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust.

After 18 months of negotiations, CSC announced this week that it had signed a non-binding letter of intent with the Department of Health that should lead to a new deal for the NME by the end of the month.

A deal is likely to see a significant reduction in contract value – by as much as £1 billion – less Lorenzo functionality, and a much smaller number of trusts contracted to take the system.

In a statement, CSC said this would still allow it to build on the “10 [implementations] deployed successfully to date.”

The company was presumably counting Bury in this list; as well as 5 Boroughs, which went live with Lorenzo R1.9 in 2009.