Pennine Care picks Paris

Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust has bought Civica’s clinical information system Paris.

EHealth Insider understands the trust, which signed the contract last week, is the first of seven in the North West clinical information systems framework group to award a contract.

Pennine spent £3.2m preparing to receive CSC’s Lorenzo electronic patient record system as the first mental health ‘early adopter’ under the National Programme for IT in the NHS, but withdrew in May 2011 and joined the framework procurement.

Civica’s Paris is one of four systems on the framework – led by NHS Shared Business Services – alongside technology from Ascribe, CSE Healthcare Systems, and Strand Technology.

Pennine ran a mini-competition to find a ‘fit for purpose’ solution and has been close to signing a contract with Civica for several months.

The trust previously told EHI that it intended to have a single system across both mental health and community services. The Civica contract would therefore mean the end for Lorenzo at NHS Bury, which Pennine Care took over in April 2011.

Bury was the first ‘early adopter’ of Lorenzo in 2009, but when Pennine Care withdrew from NPfIT, plans to roll-out further clinical functionality were abandoned.

The six other trusts on the framework are: Greater Manchester West Mental Health NHS Trust; 5 Boroughs Partnership NHS Trust; Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust; Cumbria Partnership Mental Health NHS Trust; Mersey Care NHS Trust; and Manchester Mental Health and Social Care.

Investigations by EHI reveal the trusts are at various stages of the call-off process.

Cumbria said it was focusing on its work with migrating its services to EMIS systems, while Cheshire and Wirral said it had several years left on current contracts.

Janet King, Cheshire and Wirral’s associate director of informatics, told EHI: “As we have a couple of years to go on existing contracts we are not going out to tender for any IT systems at this time."