-
- Smart Healthcare, Wednesday 14 October 2009 09.00 BST
Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust gave Mach4 Pharma Systems a deal worth £150,000 to provide such a system at the Churchill Hospital, although it said that orders may also follow for other sites. The tender said the system will dispense medication in its original packaging, and use barcodes or other automated entry.
"ORH would also like to consider using the Robot remotely outside of hours to deliver medication to a specified location," it added.
Meanwhile, West Suffolk Hospital NHS Trust and Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust both awarded contracts to Arx to provide similar systems, each paying £160,000.
The three trusts are not alone: Western Sussex Hospitals issued a tender for an automated pharmacy dispensing system during September; Bradford Teaching Hospitals, North Middlesex University Hospital and Mid Yorkshire Hospitals all published similar tenders in August; while that month also saw Arx win a £214,000 deal from Medway NHS Foundation Trust.
The biggest health ICT deal of September was a framework, worth up to £10m, awarded by the NHS North West Collaborative Commercial Agency to a number of suppliers for patient and non-patient communication systems.
The suppliers joining the two year deal, which may be extended for a further two years, are 360 CRM, Cable & Wireless, Capita Group, Data Lateral, Direct Data Services, Experian, Healthcare Communications and X-On.
On a smaller scale, South West London and St George's Mental Health NHS Trust awarded TecTrade a £553,000 contract for a data storage system, including hardware and software, to upgrade the trust's storage area network.
South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust issued a £1m tender for software and related implementation, support and maintenance. The month also saw NHS National Services Scotland publishing a £800,000 tender for a replacement quality management and analysis system, covering software, the transition of data and support.
On the research front, Kable predicted that healthcare ICT spending will rise from £2.34bn in 2007-08 to £3.48bn in 2013-14, representing a compound annual growth of 6.9%, with the growth mainly due to spending on software.
Information is drawn from notices published in the Official Journal of the European Union. These, along with a monthly analysis of ICT tenders in all government sectors, are available to customers of KableDIRECT.
