Three more early adopters for Lorenzo

Tags: A Acute Bury Christine Connelly Community Connelly CSC E-Prescribing Foundation Trust Informatics Information iPM iPM iS iSoft Lorenzo Mental Health NHS Bury Order communications Pennine Care Scheduling Strategic

19 May 2009

Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has confirmed it will be the next acute site to implement Lorenzo.

The trust told E-Health Insider that it had become an early adopter site for the iSoft patient administration system, as part of the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

In addition to Kettering, E-Health Insider has also learned that a primary care trust and a mental health services trust will be next adopters of Lorenzo regional care.

NHS Bury’s Informatics Plan says NHS Bury and Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust will move from iSoft's iPM to Lorenzo Regional Care. The plan also says that Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust will implement Lorenzo.

The primary care trust and a mental health services trust have also committed to deploying Lorenzo, which is currently being used on a limited scale by two acute trusts and one PCT.

However, a spokesperson for that trust told EHI: “Despite remaining committed to the vision and aims of the National Programme for IT, Pennine Acute is not an early adopter of Lorenzo Regional Care.”

Both of the confirmed sites in the NHS Bury Informatics Plan aim to deploy Lorenzo Regional Care by November, leading to speculation that they may be the sites that Christine Connelly was referring to when she announced new deadlines for deploying ‘strategic’ electronic patient record systems to the NHS.

At Healthcare Computing 2009, the director general of informatics said Lorenzo must be implemented in any care-setting by November and “running smoothly” across one acute trust by March next year.

However, a spokesperson for CSC would not confirm that these were the sites working to her deadline. They said: “We are currently working with NHS Connecting for Health and the trusts to agree sequence and timing of the projects to meet objectives agreed with the NHS.”

The informatics plan shows that NHS Bury and Pennine Care intend to implement Lorenzo to fulfil the ‘Clinical 5’ requirements outlined in the Health Informatics Review published last year.

A chart shows a strategy of implementing patient administration systems, order communications and diagnostics reporting, letters with coding, scheduling and e-prescribing through various releases of Lorenzo, beginning now and continuing over the next two to three years.

A statement provided by Barbara Hoyle, ICT director at Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust, said: “The trust is currently undertaking a project which will replace the existing iPM application with CSC Alliance Lorenzo Regional Care.

“The trust has agreed to participate in the early adopter phase of deployment of Release 1.9. The trust will deploy Lorenzo Regional Care across all its inpatient, outpatient and community services in November 2009.”

NHS Bury told E-Health Insider that it was also committed to the full deployment of Lorenzo Regional Care.

Carol Woods, senior responsible officer for Lorenzo Regional Care said: “In order to facilitate improved information sharing across services, the trust is working to replace its current patient administration system, iPM, with Lorenzo Care Management.

“We are looking to deploy the system to all staff that use iPM in November 2009. We have been working closely with clinical and administrative staff from every service to understand their requirements and we have agreed with them how the system will be used once it has been deployed.

“We are looking forward to the benefits Lorenzo Regional Care will bring, including allowing clinical information to be shared appropriately and securely between health care professionals to build a better picture of the patients care.”

Last month, Alan Spours, chief information officer at NHS North West Strategic Health Authority, told the Harrogate conference that he would like to see release 1 of Lorenzo rolled out more extensively.

He said: “We also want to see release 1.9 live in two sites by the end of the year. The early adopters are working to develop Lorenzo 1.9; who will be ahead in November we don’t know yet.”

He also said that Lorenzo 1.9 is “much more than a PAS” and is an “added value system” It links to picture archiving and has the ability to include voice recognition.

Link: NHS Bury Informatics Planning 2009-2012

Sarah Bruce

Readers Comments

Early?

19 May 09 10:39

Considering when the announcement was made on npfit and the use of Lorenzo, I think the use of the phrase early adopter is pushing it a bit.

When is a PAS not a PAS?

19 May 09 11:23

Hmm.. the message given was that the pilot deployment of Lorenzo last year at Morecombe isn't a PAS at all. It was reported as >>a system that is fed by the trust’s PAS, iPM. http://tinyurl.com/n8hzxj Is this article reporting simply a rebranding of iPM as Lorenzo Regional Care to satisfy the political deadline?

The question (anyway) to be asked is what clinical functionality is to be rolled out.

To see them making a song and dance about PAS deployment is hugely depressing at this stage of the game - lab results, order communications and even outpatatient prescribing, electronic discharge summaries etc were being deployed in NHS Hospitals in the 1990's.

What Early Adopters are for?

19 May 09 12:24

Just in respect of the last comment about Early Adopters. Early Adopters are used in the Lorenzo Programme as the initial Trusts to take a particular release. We have had the Release 1 EA's which have been well documented. These EA's relate to the next and large scale release of PAS functionality, known as Release 1.9. It makes sense to use Early Adopters for each new substantial release and in fact this was recommended by the PAC.

Release 1.9

19 May 09 13:52

Could anybody enlighten us as to what is actually in this release or is this commercially sensitive information just in case Lorenzo turns out to be just an integration engine as some people suspect and the PAS(patient admin system) an updated IPM

I don't think you're quite getting it

19 May 09 17:33

Can we just agree to call them Late Early Adopters Desperate for Electronic Records.

doing the maths

20 May 09 08:07

So cutting out the spin that this is 3 go-lives and focussing on the 1 actual HOSPITAL that will be taking the product, that makes 1 deployment in 2008 (Morecambe) and 1 in 2009. Given that there are around 70 hospitals in NME, that means that the programme is due to complete (at this rate) in around 2077.

Even if the rate doubles year on year for the next 5 years (by which time CSC will be deploying at a rate of over 60pa) the deployment only just completes by the contract end of 2016

Isn't this why the Penfield contract (which you'll recall was only signed last month) - as I understand it - calls for 30 deployments by next March, not the 1 or 2 that are forecast in this article.

Post edited by EHI

What's going on here?

20 May 09 09:21

This story is a bit confusing for those of us not close to the IT side on things. Based upon E-Health Insider reports:

Christine Connelly says there must be "significant progress" in delivering information systems to the acute sector by November 2009.
We are told that Cerner has 12 live sites & that work is underway on the next one (Kingston?).
iSOFT has a limited(?) implementation at Morecambe Bay & rumours are that Pennine Care will be the proving ground for the November deadline, but that this doesn't include acute care.
Cerner are making people redundant & iSOFT may be re-badging an old product as the new one.

Is anything clear about progress/hurdles?

If not, perhaps people should stop expressing their views & (perhaps) trying to influence others' opinions, without making their level of understanding clear. Let's just see how things play out over the summer. Surely we all want to see successess, not failures - don't we?

Clarifying the Position

20 May 09 11:36

As someone who is fairly close to this can I clarify a couple of comments in the above.

Firstly, Lorenzo 1.9 is a completely new PAS product, called Care Management which also includes functionality to support Mental Health Organisations. For those who have seen the functionality its much more than a straightforward PAS, and looks very impressive. Therefore it is'nt an existing PAS product being rebadged by iSoft etc, but a new product with all the challenges that poses.

Secondly, I would support the comment the above which suggests we should have more informed views on this. As we approach the end of 2009/10 we should be able to make judgements on how effective Lorenzo deployments are in respect of the underpinning EPR functionality, including orders, results clinical documentation and the enhanced PAS (Care Management).

Clarifying the Position 2 + the real world

20 May 09 15:02

From reading this article and the comments afterwards, it seems there are two problems:

1. The powers that be are not open enough about the products that are going to be delivered (this includes the Government, NHS and the Service Providers).

2. The people who are either trouble makers, don't understand or are just plain grumpy sit on e-health-insider all day and comment instead of doing their real jobs .

The fact of the matter is the software providers need to develop modern, scalable software which is flexible and stable and which will allow the NHS to deliver care effectively. This costs money and takes time, especially as every week somebody changes the goal post.

Furthermore the NHS is unique, and I would prefer that three Acute hospitals (Kettering, Morecambe & Bradford) plus Mental Health and Community Trusts (Bury, Pennine Care and South Birmingham) pilot the software, rip it to shreds if need be and then allow the providers to fix any problems and roll out the product en mass at a later date.

Every company pilots software first, Microsoft for example are in the Release Candidate phase for Windows 7 (very good I might add, but with a few bugs), so that the User who buys the products can get the best out of it. This is called the real world and some people think the NHS is not part of it!

As a previous poster said, stop winging and let them get on with it, as all the aforementioned trusts are going to make sure they get the best they can in the end and their reputations preceed them!