Lorenzo ‘will stop at Release 2’
- 10 February 2010
CSC may only deliver the first two releases of Lorenzo, the electronic patient record system being deployed across the North, Midlands and East of England, under the National Programme for IT in the NHS.
According to a number of sources close to the programme, local service provider CSC will only roll-out the releases that it has already received from software developer, iSoft.
At E-Health Insider Live ’09, iSoft executive chairman and chief executive, Gary Cohen, told the audience that Release 2 – or ‘clinicals’ – had been released to CSC and that Release 3 would be delivered to the LSP during 2010.
It appears that CSC will roll out R2, which include care plans, TTO prescribing and emergency care. But it may now not deliver modules in further releases that were meant to include inpatient prescribing, theatres, maternity, social care messaging and GP integration.
EHI also understands that trusts will be given the flexibility to choose the functionality that they require, although it is not clear whether this will have to be provided by iSoft or CSC.
A joint statement issued by CSC and Connecting for Health, said that discussions around the scope of Lorenzo are continuing following health secretary Andy Burnham’s announcement in December that £600m would be axed from the £12.7 billion programme.
The statement said: “[Burnham] made clear that we intend to build on what is already working well in primary, acute and community settings, while giving trusts more flexibility within the framework provided by the local service provider contracts.
“No decisions have yet been made about changes to future releases of Lorenzo as a number of options are currently being discussed with the local NHS.”
The latest release of Lorenzo, R1.9, has so far gone live at NHS Bury but is due to go-live at University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust during March.
A number of trusts, including Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust, Birmingham Women’s NHS Foundation Trust and Birmingham Children’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, are expected to follow in Q2 of 2010.
The statement added: “We are confident that Lorenzo will bring significant benefits for NHS patients, however in the current climate it is also important to achieve efficiencies.
“This will be managed by focusing on areas that clinicians have identified as critical to ensuring responsive information systems which support the needs of today’s health service.”
On a conference call announcing CSC’s third quarter results on Wednesday, CSC said that the outcome on the decision around reduced spending would be made by the end of Q4.
The company warned investors “not to overreact” about the £600m cuts to the national programme and said that the parties involved in the discussions realised that they had made investments and commitments at the start of the contract.
The company added that the deployment at Morecambe Bay would bring with it ‘revenue recognition’ and all milestones and performances are on track.
CSC also identified that Morecambe Bay would be the “single event in the quarter” that would create revenue; although they said that it would generate less than 50% of the cash for Q4.
The company refused to identify the percentage of its revenue that would be generated by the NHS but said that they would be “cash neutral” by the end of the fiscal year 2010.
Links:
Opinion and analysis: Read more about how the national programme’s deployments of Lorenzo have been rescheduled and about future releases of the system in our news analysis, NME at the Gate.
