Mid Essex goes live with Lorenzo EPR across organisation

Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust has gone live with DXC’s Lorenzo electronic patient record.

The go-live took place over four days starting 28 May, with the EPR now live across the whole organisation.

A spokeswoman for the trust said described the initial go-live as having “gone as well as can reasonably be expected”.

“There were some issues but these were as expected and support structures were in place. Given the scale of the go-live, activity reporting will be closely monitored and the Trust is only starting to get used to the system.”

“As with all EPR implementations, the system will take a while for staff to adapt to and this may affect performance in the short term.”

On 28 May the emergency department, wards, maternity, clinical documentation, reporting and results and information reporting went live.

This was followed by outpatients departments on 30 May, inpatient medicines prescribing and administration on 31 May and finally community maternity on 1 May.

The spokeswoman said that challenges during the go-live included “people getting used to the system, some smart card set up issues and some slight system configuration changes”.

There was also a planned reduction in clinical activity in outpatients, she said.

The cyber-attack that floored sections of the NHS on 12 May, did not impact on the go-live timing for Mid Essex, unlike North Staffordshire Combined Healthcare NHS Trust.

North Staffordshire had to delay its Lorenzo go-live by one week from 13 May to the 20 May, due to the cyber-attack.

The trust spokeswoman said the go-live was prepared for by “good organisational engagement and involvement”, and the technical and operational Gold, Silver and Bronze (clinical and administration) management structure supported the implementation.

There has been a flurry of trusts going live with Lorenzo over the last month with Mid Essex joining North Staffordshire and also Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, and there are 24 trusts using or planning to use Lorenzo across England.

This is partly a hangover from the National Programme for IT (NPfIT). After Accenture quit the NPfIT in the NHS back in 2006, CSC became the sole local service provider for the North, Midlands and East of England – three fifths of the NHS.

However, after development and deployment delays, Lorenzo went live in only a handful of trusts under NPfIT.

Other trusts has since picked the EPR, most of them as part of a post-NPfIT deal struck between CSC and the Department of Health.

The first ever Lorenzo trust was the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust, which installed the software in 2008. In February this year, the trust was pushing ahead with a major upgrade despite reporting “significant and fundamental issues” with the system nearly a decade after it was deployed.

CSC merged with HP Enterprise Services in April, under the new name of DXC.

Mid Essex employs nearly 5,000 staff and is based on four sites in and around Chelmsford, Maldon and Braintree.