Morecambe Bay NHS Trust claims it will save £35m with help from Lorenzo EPR system

Trust claims it will spend £9m on 24/7 support services, but will still save £35m over five years

University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust believes it can save £35m over the next five years when its Lorenzo electronic patient record (EPR) system is finally fully operational.

The organisation broke down the benefits it expects to receive as a result of the Lorenzo system. It said that to date it has generated £1.4m in benefits from the system and it forecasts that the benefits that will accrue from now until 2018/19 will grow to £40.7m.

In public trust board papers filed in August, in which the trust reviewed its six-year informatics IT strategy, it claimed that the EPR programme was "still very ambitious and is still ahead of most other hospital trusts".

It said that over the next two years, the programme will deliver electronic prescribing and medication administration across all its wards and departments, electronic requesting of diagnostic tests, some medical device integration and a mobile working capability.

The EPR programme forms part of an over-arching IT strategy dubbed "I3". The trust expects benefits from now until 2018/19 for the I3 strategy to be worth about £3.1m, aside from the Lorenzo EPR system.

"The collective benefits register currently predicts £43.85m savings over the life of this strategy (June 2014 to June 2019) and this benefit value significantly increases beyond this point to a 10-year prediction of £10.5m per annum," the trust said.

"However, there is a cost to the strategy covering deployment and continuing improvement of the whole informatics capabilities and support services.

"There is a need to provide an effective 24/7 support service, with total costs for this of £9m. The net five year savings of the strategy is therefore £34.85m, with a significantly higher predication at 10 years," the firm said.

Morecambe Bay went live with Lorenzo's patient administration system in 2010. Lorenzo's system, which was supposed to store data for 220 trusts in the north, eastern England and the Midlands, was part of the disastrous National Programme for IT in the NHS. The trust reportedly had issues with the system when it went live after being delivered by CSC, but after several fixes the company stabilised the system.

The trust also confirmed that it is looking for a privacy officer to work within the information governance team.