Hereford Hospitals Trust announced today that users of Lorenzo Regional Care Release 1 now number 15. The Trust went live in the Rheumatology Department on 9 September 2009.
Nurses and a consultant rheumatologist are now using Lorenzo R1 Clinical Documents functionality to support their clinics.
A statement issued by the Trust today says:
"On day one the Trust went live with a single clinic using the system; as confidence has grown, this has increased in just three weeks to around 15 users operating the system. The plan is to complete training of the remainder of the clinicians in order for the whole Department to be using Lorenzo by the end of October 2009."
The Lorenzo R1 e-records system was installed by the Trust and local service provider CSC under the National Programme for IT [NPfIT].
Alison Budd, Trust Medical Director, said: "Rheumatology volunteered to pilot this as they saw the opportunities for enhancing their already excellent clinical service with improved documentation."
This content developed in conjunction with the Hereford team is now available for other Trusts using Lorenzo.
Dr Richard Williams, Consultant Rheumatologist, said:
"I have been very pleased on how professional and thorough the project has been. I'm particularly impressed that this is the first time in the NHS where I've seen any attempt to develop a system that mirrors our practice, rather than have one that needs us to adapt our practice to an awkward IT system."
Gerry O'Keeffe, Vice President of CSC's UK Health business said the implementation had gone "smoothly".
More than 220,000 patient records were said to have been successfully migrated across from their existing system. The functionality includes "requests and results" for Pathology and further clinical documentation.
iSoft's Gary Cohen says that Lorenzo Regional Care Release 1.9 (Care Management) is expected to go live at NHS Bury by the end of 2009.
Lorenzo Regional Care Release 2.0 ( Enhanced Care Management) is expected to go live "towards the end of fiscal 2010", and Regional Care Release 3.0 (Enhanced Care Delivery)
released to CSC in calendar 2010.
Comment:
It's a small implementation, so small it probably wouldn't have been noticed if it had not been under the NPfIT. At this rate most of those now involved in the implementations at CSC would probably have retired or expired by the time the Lorenzo rollout across CSC's NHS users finishes.
But it's better to be cautious and have the support of clinicians than face the chastisement of hubris by being exuberantly and irrationally over-ambitious.
On the other hand the system has been so modified for use by Hereford that it's unclear whether the NHS or taxpayers benefits will enjoy the promised NPfIT benefits of interoperability and economies of scale.
Links:
Hereford deploys Lorenzo R1 - E-Health Insider 22 September 2009
