morcambe bay extends lorenzo

30 Apr 2009

University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust has announced that it now has two wards live with Lorenzo and that a further two are planned to go-live over the next month.

Wards four and five at Furness General Hospital are now successfully using the core Lorenzo system to record alerts, allergies, problems and procedures, to interface with the trust’s radiology information system and to create discharge summaries.

Furthermore, the trust ran a pilot in January that involved sending discharge summaries electronically to GPs and giving a copy to the patient. The trust is now looking to roll this out further.

Steve Fairclough, head of health informatics, told E-Health Insider: “We are now half way through the next step of go-live with Lorenzo. Within the next two to three weeks we will go-live on a further two orthopaedic wards.

“We chose not to roll-out at to the Lancaster Infirmary Hospital as originally planned because most of the informatics team are based at the Furness site.

"The other site is more than 50 miles away, so domestically it made sense to change the scope of the project.”

The trust said that it will expand the use of Lorenzo to the Royal Lancaster Infirmary when the next two wards at Furness General are up and running.

Morecambe Bay was the first to use the iSoft electronic patient record in an acute setting. After significant delays in its implementation, it finally went live with Lorenzo in October last year.

At the time the trust said it had given the EPR a “soft landing”; running it on one ward alongside existing paper systems and with significant IT support for clinical staff.

It says this has become a “hard landing”, with some of the paper removed and fewer informatics staff involved.

Mike McKenna, head of requirements, NHS North West, said: “Morecambe Bay along with other trusts is working to develop release 1.9.

“We hope to see a more extensive roll-out of release one and release 1.9 [care management] and also some of the innovations linked with release 1.9, such as voice recognition.”

E-Health Insider will be visiting the trust at the end of next month to see progress.

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