The Department of Health has released details of standards that suppliers must meet for an installation of the electronic patient records system Lorenzo to be considered successful.

The Department of Health say that to be considered a successful implementation all elements of the records system must exist, be working robustly, and be deployed at scale in NHS trusts by the end of November. Details are published on the department's web site.

At trust and strategic health authority level, the NHS has agreed the detail of how these criteria will be assessed.

This criteria will then be judged by the trust board and the Department of Health will then evaluate the progress of electronic patient records and decide how to continue with the rollout.

This follows a difficult history for the electronic patient records system which is currently four years behind schedule.

In April 2009 the director general for informatics Christine Connelly said that if significant progress was not achieved in implementing electronic records in hospitals by the end of November, a new plan for delivering informatics to healthcare will be considered.

Progress so far has been slow because implementations of the two types of patient records software being used in the NPfIT - Cerner's Millenium software and iSoft's Lorenzo software – have gone badly.

St Barts and the Royal Free in London both had problems with their go-lives with the Millenium software, causing the programme to stall as hospitals became wary of purring systems in until problems were fixed.

St Barts and the Royal Free in London both had problems with their go-lives with the Millenium software, causing the programme to stall as hospitals became wary of purring systems in until problems were fixed.

And a parliamentary answer from the minister for the NpfIT minister Mike O'Brien last week revealed that only 175 people were using Lorenzo's software across just five early adopter trusts in England – a cost of over £50,000 per user.

Despite the problems with the patient care records, systems in other areas of the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) have been implemented succesfully - these include digital imaging, online appointment booking, and a broadband network.