East Cheshire NHS Trust has blamed “increased periods of unavailability of the patient management system” as the reason they have switched their administration system to a new hardware platform despite being offered £1m to move to Lorenzo.
The trust made the decision after iSoft was no longer prepared to support its Clinicom PAS on its existing Alpha/Unix platform. The cost-effective option of moving to Lorenzo was considered but following an overview demonstration and a meeting with CSC and the North West Strategic Health Authority the trust decided that it “did not particularly want to be an early adopter of Lorenzo R1.9.”
The trust has therefore opted to install a £224,000 “interim option”. This involves continuing to run the iSoft Clinicom PAS and upgrading its hardware platform to iSoft’s iTanium technology and migrating the Clinicom data to the new hardware server.
A statement from the trust read: “East Cheshire NHS Trust is upgrading the hardware for the existing PAS. The PAS on the current hardware platform has become less reliable and is not able to meet future organizational requirements. The decision was taken to upgrade the existing hardware whilst exploring the option to change to the national system, Lorenzo. NHS Connecting for Health are pouring resources into Lorenzo to make it the national PAS of choice.”
The paper concluded that the system is “nearly there but might take another six to twelve months.”
