Dudley and Walsall procures system outside of NPfIT

Dudley and Walsall mental health partnership trust has rolled out an electronic patient record system outside of the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) after it was told that the earliest possible installation date for Lorenzo was 2015. After examining a number of alternatives the trust, which employs about 1,200 staff, opted to procure the Oasis Medical Solutions system as part of a shared service with Black Country mental health partnership (previously Sandwell). Dudley and Walsall contracted with the trust in November 2010 to take the system, with Black Country also providing training and deployment. Roy Dainty, head of IM&T at Dudley and Walsall, told Guardian Healthcare that the trust previously had four systems in place which were unable to link up, prone to failure and led to the duplication of patient information. He said that waiting for Lorenzo, the chosen clinical information system of local service provider CSC, was out of the question. "We were all set to receive Lorenzo, but then there were all the delivery problems that CSC was having with it, and then we found out that the scope of where Lorenzo was going to be delivered was going to be reduced, so we had to seek an alternative," he said. He explained that the there was a very small window for implementation as the money provisioned for Lorenzo would not be available after 2010-11. Dainty said the main benefits of implementing the Oasis system were cost savings, and having one system that all staff can use rather than the four it had previously. Explaining the rationale behind taking the Oasis system, Ian Baines, director of finance, performance and estates at Dudley and Walsall, said: "The lack of coherent clinical and informatics resources was a big risk for us. We desperately needed a single, proven, NHS care records service compliant mental health system. "But last year we were told that the earliest possible date for Lorenzo would be 2015. Clearly that was unacceptable because of the adverse clinical and financial risk which our increasingly fragile systems presented." The project to install Lorenzo software, developed by iSoft, across NHS sites in England is running several years behind schedule. This article is published by Guardian Professional. Join the Guardian Healthcare Network to receive regular emails on NHS innovation