Heart of England plans £10m record scan

May also saw multimillion pound contracts awarded by Scotland's health service for address management software and Northern Ireland for GP systems

A service to scan medical records, worth an estimated £5m-£10m, was the largest published tender in healthcare IT during May. It was posted by Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust, which wants to digitise its records for Documentum and Folding Space software, a job it says will take from three to 10 years. The paper records are currently stored in a number of the trust's locations in and around Birmingham.

Such projects are major undertakings for a trust, and are not covered by the National Programme for IT. May also saw St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust discussing its £1.2m deal with Eastman Kodak and OITUK, which involves scanning some 250m pages in 1m case files.

The only other technology related tender with an estimated seven figure value in May came from Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, which provides mental health and learning disability services. It plans to spend around £1.2m on security systems, including CCTV cameras, a key control system, access control and a staff attack alarm system.

Scotland's National Information Systems Group awarded the month's largest contract, striking a £5.5m deal with QAS to provide address management software based on Scotland's national gazetteer. The system will be available to all health organisations in the country.

HSC Business Services Organisation, which buys on behalf of health and social care in Northern Ireland, agreed a deal worth just over £3m for GP clinical IT systems and services. The framework deal involves four companies, under which INPS will receive around £1.25m, Emis £900,000, iSoft £630,000 and Merlok Systems £270,000.

A parliamentary written answer published on 1 June threw more light on April's announcement that BT would take responsibility for Cerner Millennium at 12 acute trusts in the south of England and would deploy RiO software at 25 mental and community trusts in the same area. Ben Bradshaw – who has since been promoted from health minister to culture secretary – said that BT would get an extra £546m in 2004-05 prices for the work. In total, the firm will get £1.57bn for its local service provider work in London and the south.

Victor Almeida, Kable's senior health analyst, described the value of BT's southern work contract as an "oddity", pointing out that the 37 trusts represent a minority of the 93 in the region. Fujitsu's contract, which held the southern LSP deal until last year, was worth just £896m, but BT's contract covering just 37 trusts is worth 61% of that value.

Challenged on the size of the deal at Smart Healthcare Live on 10 June, Connecting for Health's outgoing head Martin Bellamy said that he was unable to discuss the negotiations with BT, but added: "We are confident that the contract extension represents value for money."

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.