Morecambe Bay set for Lorenzo dry run

Morecambe Bay University Hospitals NHS Trust will this weekend carry out a dry run of Lorenzo Release 1.9 this weekend, E-Health Insider understands.

Sources say that the trust will run the system in parallel to its current legacy iPM patient administration system over the next two days, with the intention of going live over the bank holiday weekend at the end of May.

If the implementation over 29-31 May is successful, it would be the first of Lorenzo 1.9 in an acute NHS trust. The A&E system would follow 6-8 weeks later.

Morecambe Bay was meant to go-live with the system by the end of March, to achieve a hard deadline set for Computer Sciences Corporation set by DH chief information officer Christine Connelly.

The delays at Morecambe Bay has resulted in the next three trusts, Birmingham Women’s NHS Foundation Trust, Kettering General Hospital and Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust all having to put back planned go-live dates. All three have confirmed to EHI they will not go live with the system in May as previously planned.

Kettering General Hospital has moved its implementation date to the of June, and said it is progressing well with the implementation.

Director of strategy and partnerships at Kettering General Hospital, Mike Smeeton, said: “We have made positive progress with Lorenzo, and will confirm when we will go live once the trust board is assured that we are ready.”

An April trust newsletter said: “We are currently working towards the switch between systems taking place in late June 2010. Both the existing PAS and A&E parts of the system will be replaced with Lorenzo.”

Birmingham Women’s who had been due to go live this Monday, told E-Health Insider: “Regarding the Lorenzo Implementation; we will not be going live on May 10th and a new date for when Lorenzo Release 1.9 will be introduced at Birmingham Women’s NHS Foundation Trust is currently being determined.”

However, the trust is advertising job vacancies for “Lorenzo trainers for urgent starts” and “IT project support managers to test and debug the in-house Lorenzo computer system,” suggesting that preparations are in full swing.

In addition, sources have told EHI that Pennine Care has been considering dropping its implementation of Lorenzo, following letters sent out by the NHS North West last month that gave trusts the choice to opt out of the National Programme for IT without facing penalties.

Pennine Care had been scheduled to go-live at the end of November, then May and now June. The trust said it was not having a wobble, and said: “Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust has no plans to drop the implementation of Lorenzo Regional Care 1.9.”

CSC has so far installed versions of iSoft Lorenzo at eight NHS trusts, two of them hospitals and six primary care trusts (PCT). The most recent implementation was at Bury PCT in November 2009.

Speaking at E-Health Insider Live last November, Gary Cohen, iSoft executive chairman and chief executive, said that 25 trusts would go-live with Lorenzo in 2010. Five months into 2010 no additional trusts have deployed the software.