Transforming healthcare

It is hard to imagine an area of our lives that hasn’t been changed by technology. The Internet is our retail park, travel guide and reference library. Mobile phones and laptops keep us in constant touch with friends, family and business colleagues all over the world.

Many organisations use these technologies to build sophisticated, personalised services around individual citizens. Retailers, travel agents and others combine information from many systems and deliver it to customers via easy-to-use interfaces running across a variety of devices.

LORENZO brings the benefits of this approach to healthcare. Secure, personalised websites can provide citizens with day-to-day advice on common diseases and drugs. Citizens can book their appointments with a family doctor or at an outpatient surgery using the Internet or digital television. And appointment reminders and repeat prescriptions can be sent to mobile devices using simple text messages.

For healthcare professionals, administrators and governments LORENZO is the answer to the urgent questions at the heart of healthcare today. Accurate, on-demand information supports the delivery of more timely and consistent patient care. In addition, LORENZO supports the appropriate re-distribution of workloads from acute services into more efficient local settings, such as community care.

By supporting better management of existing resources, LORENZO increases efficiency and value at every point in the supply chain. LORENZO also helps healthcare provider organisations to promote corporate and clinical governance.

	A seamless patient journey Gastroenterology consultant Dr Frank Pirez has a patient diagnosed with colonic cancer. Before he decides to recommend a course of treatment or surgery, he first needs to make an assessment of the co-morbidity in this case, to determine whether surgery would be the most appropriate course of action.

	Dr Pirez already knows that his patient has asthma and diabetes, but by looking up the patient's electronic patient record, he can quickly access information that can help him make a decision at the point of care. In this case he is able to immediately assess that the patient has good lung function and normal blood pressure in spite of these conditions and has previously undertaken surgery without complication.

	With the necessary information at his fingertips, Dr Pirez can confidently recommend surgery as the most appropriate course of action. After discussing with the patient, he uses the system to initiate the booking of an anterior resection to remove the affected section of the colon.

	Administration staff immediately pick this up and organise an appropriate time with the patient using their electronic booking and scheduling system to book staff and resources for the surgery. As diabetes was already recorded as one of the patient's problems, the electronic booking service only considers the first appointments of the day as appropriate.