EmailMorecambe Bay Hospitals – which already uses an earlier version of the software – Bury Primary Care Trust, Pennine Care Mental Health Trust, Birmingham Women's Hospital and Kettering General Hospital are taking part in the Lorenzo Early Adopter Programme.
Alan Spours, chief information officer of the NHS North West Strategic Health Authority, told the HC2009 conference in Harrogate on 29 April 2009 that the new version 1.9 of Lorenzo is "much more than a PAS (patient administration system)". It handles mental health, will link to picture archiving and communications systems, and may also include voice recognition, which is often used within radiology.
It will also improve interoperability with primary care systems, allowing users to navigate swiftly between a patient's Lorenzo record and the primary care one. Spours said he wants to establish further links between Lorenzo and other systems.
He told the conference that he expects many more trusts to follow the first five, adding that the north west is looking at implementing "thin Lorenzo" with a restricted set of functions across a wider area, such as Cumbria and north Lancashire. "We think this is a more flexible way of deploying Lorenzo effectively," he said.
His colleague Mike McKenna said that Morecambe Bay, which is currently using release 1.0 of the software, went live with the system on two surgical wards at Furness General Hospital in January. It plans to extend the system to orthopaedics during May, then extend it to the Royal Lancaster Infirmary.
The version is also live at Bradford's acute trust and at South Birmingham Primary Care Trust, where it used in podiatry.
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