Morecambe Bay goes soft on Lorenzo

Morecambe Bay University Hospitals NHS Trust now plans to have a soft launch of Lorenzo Release 1.9 on Easter Bank Holiday weekend.

E-Health Insider understands that the trust now plans to have a soft launch to record a April 2 go-live. It will, however,  continue to run its existing iPM patient administration system as its main PAS, while gradually beginning to use Lorenzo R1.9.

The Morecambe Bay trust held a board meeting on Wednesday morning. In a statement to E-Health Insider, Morecambe Bay chief executive Tony Halsall said that the board remains committed, but is yet to be assured that Lorenzo is ready to go live.

Halsall said: “We remain committed to being the first acute trust in England to go live with Lorenzo Regional Care 1.9 but we will make sure it works for us and our patients before we roll it out across our hospitals.”

He added: “We remain confident in Lorenzo and have made positive progress towards launching it, both in terms of training thousands of staff and rigorously testing the system.

The trust chief executive added: “The trust board will confirm when it is assured that we are ready to go live.”

The new software will initially be used on a limited basis, less widely than had been previously intended.

EHI has been told that the trust now plans to follow a soft launch with a hard launch in May, more than one month after the deadline, set by director general of informatics Christine Connelly, for “significant progress” last year.

But even a soft launch, followed by a hard launch in May could prove a challenging schedule to meet.

EHI has learned that a meeting held by the NHS North East Programme Board Thursday morning did not establish a go-live date but concluded it was no longer expected that Morecambe Bay will go-live by the end of March.

A key test load of patient data into the new system, an essential step towards success at the trust, failed last month.

Sources say that there are still problems with uploading data to the system and that there are over a hundred bugs, the fixes to which, are also causing problems at NHS Bury, four months after it switched on the Lorenzo software. 

Earlier this month, EHI reported that a new deal with CSC for the North, Midlands and East of England hinges on the trust-wide go-live of Lorenzo at University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust by the end of March.