Lorenzo, the future strategic care records software promised to three-fifths of the English NHS has officially launched internationally in Sydney, Australia.
IBA Health, the owners of software developer iSoft, announced the global launch of Lorenzo, hot on the heels of the news last week that the first acute NHS trust, University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust, has begun to pilot the first version of the software.
South Birmingham Primary Care Trust has also started to pilot the first version of the software.
First promised to be delivered in late 2004 Lorenzo is the next-generation electronic record and care pathways software is meant to be delivered in a series of releases to the health service. The product is developed from the ground up on a service orientated architecture.
Under the £12.7 billion NHS National Programme for IT, Lorenzo is meant to be delivered to 60% of NHS trusts by prime contractor Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) in a series of four increasingly complex software releases between now and 2012.
“Lorenzo sets the stage to transform the delivery of healthcare around the world by providing the foundation upon which to build and deliver new generations of highly configurable, high quality, cost-effective, connected healthcare services,” IBA Health’s executive chairman and CEO, Gary Cohen said in a statement.
IBA says that Lorenzo enables healthcare providers to manage their processes whilst at the same time giving secure authorised access to patient information to those who need it.
“Following several years of development and the successful testing in early adopter sites, in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, Lorenzo is now ready to be launched,” IBA said in a statement.
In addition to the two UK pilot sites, Lorenzo is currently being piloted in Holland and at Aachen University Hospital in Germany.
Over recent months IBA has emphasised the difference between the full wall-to-wall NHS version of Lorenzo meant to deliver a full clinically rich care records service (CRS) and the more flexible ‘Lorenzo Studio’ version it says it will sell outside the English NHS.
There are early indications that iSoft is seeking to sell the less complex Lorenzo Studio platform into the NHS market, possibly in direct competition to its main customer CSC. The test ground is likely to be the so-called iSoft seven trusts in London and in areas of southern England such as Kent and Medway.
In a September interview with E-Health Insider Cohen said the first element of Lorenzo to launch would be this international version, which he said will become the “health operating system”, able to utilise web services to link together a range of legacy systems.
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