Bury formally accepts Lorenzo R1.9

Tags: A Bury Connelly iSoft Kingston Morecambe Bay NHS Bury NPfIT

27 Nov 2009

NHS Bury has accepted iSoft’s electronic patient record system, three weeks after becoming the first NHS organisation to go-live with Lorenzo Regional Care Release 1.9.

Last week, E-Health Insider revealed that NHS Bury had set its own ‘local criteria’ to determine whether the implementation had been a success.

A board document said: “The project board will formally meet and determine whether Lorenzo Regional Care Release 1.9 meets the criteria 21 days after the go-live.”

It added that the project board would make a recommendation to the PCT's interim chief executive, Dr Mike Burrows, about whether the system should be accepted or rejected.

It said the decision would then be reported to NHS Connecting for Health, which would feed it into a bigger decision on whether Lorenzo and Cerner Millennium have made the "significant progress" demanded in the acute sector.

NHS Bury's criteria were split into four sections, considering whether Lorenzo supported its business processes; the availability and performance of system; user satisfaction; and impact on patient care.

In a statement, Ann Halpin, associate director of IM&T at NHS Bury told EHI: “On Tuesday 24 November, the NHS Bury Early Adopter Project Board met to consider whether the implementation of Lorenzo Regional Care has sufficiently met the success criteria set prior to the go-live.

“I can confirm that the trust accepts the system, and wishes to continue its use and engage in further system updates."

Responding to questions about rumoured problems around reporting, the trust said it had faced some small issues which it intends to resolve.

“As is to be expected with any early adopter deployment, there have been a number of manageable issues during the early life of the system. Many of these have either been resolved or will be resolved in the coming weeks,” Halpin added.

Around 600 clinical and administrative staff across 31 community services are now using the system to manage their administrative tasks including booking appointments, recording contacts and managing casenotes.

In April, director general of informatics Christine Connelly set deadlines for local service providers CSC and BT to achieve “significant” progress with the ‘strategic’ systems they are due to deliver under the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

She said that CSC must get iSoft’s Lorenzo into a care setting by November and “working smoothly” in an acute setting by March. Meanwhile, she said that BT must get Cerner's Millennium into another acute trust by November.

Meeting the criteria set out by NHS Bury is a significant step. The next big set for Cerner is Kingston Hospital NHS Trust's go-live with Millennium, which is due to happen this weekend.

Link: iSoft

CSC

Sarah Bruce

Bury sets criteria for Lorenzo success (19 Nov 2009)
Bury goes live with first Lorenzo PAS (03 Nov 2009) (20)
Bury outlines scope of Lorenzo R1.9 (06 Oct 2009) (7)
Bury is Lorenzo’s November milestone (18 Aug 2009) (14)

Readers Comments

My my.

27 Nov 09 15:57

Blooming eck Power Point with functionality – whatever next!

Did they take the easy option?

02 Dec 09 09:38

I suspect that weighing up the diffculty of trying to revert back to their old system, Bury will have decided that Lorenzo would have to be monumentally bad to make the pain of the transition back to the old PAS worth while.

This should be a non-story though - good project management and governance during the implementation stage (along with the need for strong Trust managers and directors to argue the case as required) should ensure that no Trust goes live with a system that is not fit for purpose.

I know some Trusts in the south were 'forced' live with systems (Cerner basically) that were far from fit for purpose, and that has helped give all national systems a bad (or worse) name, but those decisions to go live were taken by people who were pressured into allowing their Trusts to be damaged in that way - hopefully Trust managers have learned from that example and will not allow it to happen again.