Humber NHS Foundation Trust and Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust plan to create a unified Lorenzo electronic patient record across both trusts.
Humber went live with the Lorenzo EPR from CSC in May last year as the first mental health ‘early adopter’ under CSC’s local service provider contract for the North Midlands and East of England.
Its neighbouring acute trust, Hull and East Yorkshire, is due to go live with the same system in September 2014 under the new deal agreed between the Department of Health and CSC a year ago.
Martyn Smith, the trust’s director of IT and innovation, told EHI that part of the Lorenzo programme is to bring together the trust’s patient database with that of Humber in a single record for both acute and mental health.
“This allows for a unified patient record, capturing the totality of a patient’s treatment across both trusts,” he said.
“The clinical benefits of this approach are clear: staff will have better information about the patients they are treating.”
Hull and East Yorkshire gained approval to take the system by the CSC LSP Programme Board last month.
A spokesperson from Humber said the mental health trust has decided to defer the deployment of a new Lorenzo module while it is working on using Hull and East Yorkshire’s integration engine to avoid duplication of “resources, applications and services between the two organisations.”
“The trust has agreed to defer Lorenzo request and results as we are going to work with Hull and East Yorkshire Hospital NHS Trust and utilise their Ensemble trust integration engine for our messages,” said the Humber spokesperson.
Earlier this year, the trust stopped all further go-lives of the system as it was experiencing problems with the mental health minimum data set in Lorenzo.
The trust spokesperson said the issues had now been resolved.
“The brief stop in new deployments was applied to create stability in the data sets to allow more effective problems solving and fixes to be applied. CSC has provided fixes for the Mental Health Minimum Data Set,” said the spokesperson.
“We do have further improvement and long term fixes for the mental health minimum data set to be implemented. These fixes will reduce the additional work for the information management team.”
The trust only registers mental health patients on Lorenzo as it also uses TPP’s SystmOne for community.
“We do have a significant presence for our community services so we will continue to use both Lorenzo and SystmOne for our services. We use the most appropriate system to support our clinical services,” said the spokesperson.
“Community workers require a mobile disconnected working solution: we are currently working with CSC for a solution for mobile working.”