BT, which along with CSC now dominates the National Programme for IT, will take responsibility for eight hospitals already using Cerner's Millennium software and deploy it at four more as yet undisclosed acute trusts. The firm will also deploy RiO software at 25 mental and community health sites in the south, having already installed the software in this kind of trust within London.
In a parliamentary written answer on 23 April 2009, health minister Ben Bradshaw said the government has paid £92.8m as "working capital to aid with infrastructure, planning and development work in advance of the deployment of systems and services... and in return for a reduction in payments to be earned for future successful delivery".
He added that BT has received a further £183,000 relating to work already carried out with NHS bodies in the south, "as a consequence of termination of the contract with Fujitsu".
In response a further parliamentary question on 7 May, Bradshaw said that all the £92.8m would be deducted from BT's payment for delivering the systems concerned.
April's biggest published tender in health IT came from England's Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC), which advertised for a £13m service to manage the extraction of data from primary healthcare systems.
The service will have two main components. The first is a General Practice Extraction Tool (GPET) query management service, known as GPET-Q, which will include hardware, software, systems and software development, training and maintenance.
Among the functions required are query specification and reuse of previous queries, drawing from a library of prior work stored within the tool; scheduling of the query specification; the management of GP practice opt in/out of extractions; and the ability for GP practices to kitemark query specifications against their own clinical systems. The tender document says there should be an option to extend the use of the tool to the rest of the UK. The second tool, GPET extraction (GPET-E), will be purchased separately.
NHS Scotland's Common Services Agency published a tender for a £5.5m computerised screening system to support the national introduction of the country's Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA) programme between 2011-13. The supplier of the 10 year contract will supply, implement and support the system throughout Scotland and also provide training to clinical and administrative users.
The agency said it is happy to use a bespoke or an existing system, but it must be able to identify participants for AAA screening based on agreed parameters, and also schedule appointments. The system will also be able to capture and store images from ultrasound scanning devices, interface with other NHS Scotland national systems while working with the requirements of Scotland's individual NHS boards.
NHS Scotland also awarded a £2.61m framework contract to CIS Oncology, for a cancer chemotherapy prescribing and administration system. Again, this is a national system to be used by all the country's boards, which will work with national and local IT system. The tender notice required the system to be supported for seven years and for the supplier to provide ongoing development and deployment services.
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.
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