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Lorenzo live at Morecambe Bay by end of month
15 Sep 2008

Computer Science Corporation’s chief technology officer for the National Programme for IT in the NHS has said it will implement Lorenzo at the first acute trust by the end of September.

Speaking at an industry event in St Albans last week, Mike Dyer said University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust will go live “by the end of the month.” South Birmingham Primary Care Trust became the first to go live with a version of iSoft’s flagship software at the end of August.

Speaking of delays to the Lorenzo product Dyer said: “Four years ago we wrote a contract that said we would deliver in four months; that didn’t happen. So we said we’d take and put in some legacy systems produced by iSoft.”

CSC is the local service provider for three out of five of NPfIT’s regions. Describing the situation when the original LSP contracts were signed, Dyer said: “At the time they said they’d have their flagship product delivered in six months. It simply wasn’t delivered on time.”

However, he said that his experience of 30 years with CSC, working on more than 100 projects, showed that delays to software were an unfortunate fact of life. “That’s the nature of so software delivery.”

Dyer said that he was brought in 18-months ago, from his “day job” heading CSC’s engineering group, to “break the log-jam” in software development delays. He described the situation he faced as the most challenging environment he’d ever worked in.

“We had the right to step in and take over management of [the Lorenzo] development. We elected to use that right, but it was incredibly difficult as it was at that time that the company [iSoft] was being sold.”

Having the exercised the step-in right on development of Lorenzo, CSC decided the project was worth sticking with. “We looked at the software and said this is worth saving. The most important thing to us is getting it to market.”

But completing Lorenzo meant taking a razor to chunks of the product iSoft had been developing in Chennai. “We found that it had plans to build an integration engine. This is something we put a stop to.”

In the absence of Lorenzo, CSC had to focus on installing iSoft legacy products, even though these weren’t integrated. Speaking on the day that CSC announced it has appointed InterSystems to provide the trust integration engine, Dyer said: “We put things in quickly and as a result they weren’t integrated, and a variety of integration engines were used. But there comes a point where you have to stop, take stock and do it right.”

Outlining CSC’s central objectives on the national programme and how the Lorenzo product is planned to be delivered, Dyer said: “It’s a flagship approach based on a single electronic patient record with satellite applications, being synchronised by an IT engine.”

Dyer said that as CTO of CSC’s NHS team the maxims he sought to apply were simple. “Scalability, reliability and consistency are the three most important things that matter to me from the CTO level.”

He said the last seven months have been spent performance tuning Lorenzo, and a similar amount of time ensuring the scalability. “You build for scalability and tune for performance.”