Only 175 people using flagship NHS software, says minister

Lorenzo care records system is likely to be costing taxpayer hundreds of thousands of pounds per user per year

Not many doctors are using patient software

There are only 174 clinicians using Lorenzo patient software across the five early adopter trusts, according to Mike O'Brien, minister for the National Programme for IT (NPfIT).

Five Boroughs Partnership, Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay, Hereford Hospitals and South Birmingham have only ever had 19 clinicians using the systems at the same time.

Lorenzo is one of two software packages being used to set up centralised electronic health records as part of the £12.7bn National Programme for IT. This part of the programme is already running four years late.

Lorenzo is being supplied by services company CSC to trusts in the north of England and by its developer iSoft directly to trusts in the south after Fujitsu was fired from the programme.

The other patient software package is Cerner Millennium, being supplied by BT in London and a handful of trusts in the south.

The information came from a parliamentary question tabled by Richard Bacon MP.

Last week in the Commons he said:

"I tabled a question yesterday about the number of hospital trusts where Lorenzo has been partially deployed, asking how many users — how many concurrent users — of Lorenzo there are.

"It is literally just a handful, which means that the cost per user is not what one would expect… the cost is going to be many hundreds of thousands — possibly even more than a million — pounds per user per year."

Bacon said there had not been further deployments of the software since the eary adopters because other trusts were wary of the systems.

"The reason is that the handful of deployments attempted have been an absolute mess, causing chaos in the hospitals where they were tried," he said.

However since he spoke NHS Bury has gone live with the Lorenzo Software.

Deployments of Cerner Millennium have also caused problems, with St Barts in London now facing fines of £400,000 a month for missing patient care targets as a result of problems with the system.

Bacon also points out that the recently signed contracts with BT to deploy Cerner Millennium at hospitals in the south require BT to be paid even if the hospitals refuse the systems – a possibility if they think they will not work.

"If the trusts cannot be persuaded to take the systems because they do not work — they will not, of course, if they do not work — the taxpayer will have to pay BT 60 per cent of that £73m for not taking them," he said.

Junior Treasury minister Sarah McCarthy-Fry defended The NPfIT in the debate.

She said: "We all acknowledge that the NHS IT project is hugely ambitious and that it is essential that we get it right. It is obvious to everybody that many challenges remain.

"We still believe that Cerner Millennium and Lorenzo will be able to support the NHS in the long term."