Derby Teaching Introduce Groundbreaking Contingency for Lorenzo

Derby Teaching Hospitals have implemented ReStart’s PAS Mirror and Business Continuity solution as a fail-safe for the trust’s Electronic Patient Record system Lorenzo.

The CSC provided EPR manages patient admissions, transfers and discharges - which are integrated with other vital clinical systems via Ensemble.

However, Derby intermittently suffer an EPR outage which causes the Lorenzo data to become inaccessible and significantly impacts patient care - forcing staff to revert to a paper-based contingency process.

This method can create additional issues by relying on paper and manual processes during the outages.

Therefore, to counteract these issues the trust have deployed a continuation plan should Lorenzo be unavailable.

The system mirrors the PAS by storing data and transactions that are undertaken in the EPR, allowing clinical staff to access information during planned, or unplanned down time.

“The impact of our PAS / core EPR not running for whatever reason can be quite severe, not only because of the loss of the system itself but of all the downstream systems it interfaces with”, Mark Norwood, Associate Director of IM&T at Derby Teaching Hospitals said.

“This affects us at an operational and efficiency level and also from a patient safety perspective.

“There is clinical risk involved in not being able to access and update patient records and appointments at the point of care which can impact on clinicians being able to do their jobs effectively.

“The priority for us was to future-proof ourselves against any outages and ensure we had control over a backup plan should the worst happen.

“In essence, what ReStart provided for us was a way of ensuring we could continue to work as normal when Lorenzo Care Management was not available.

“It is an absolutely essential back-up plan and one which has now been enhanced further to capture movements of patients in Emergency Care.

“The additional functionality which ensures we can also track Emergency Care patients in the event of any downtime will significantly improve our ability to manage patients.

“We are confident the measures we have taken help us minimise clinical risk, ensure patient safety, improve data quality and avoid the need for paper-based back up processes”.

The system is being monitored by several other trust’s around the UK who are currently discussing implementing a contingency of their own in order to maintain patient care during outages.

With success evident from Derby’s integration, it would seem nonsensical for other NHS organisations to not take note, and implement a similar system alongside their own EPR be it Lorenzo or otherwise.