BT and Accenture the early winners.

NHS announced two early winners of its major £4.7 billion national clinical information system (data spine and regional) contracts as BT and Accenture. The vendors competing for data spine contract were IBM and BT whereas the major vendors competing to provide actual clinical software for five regional contracts are Cerner, IDX, iSOFT, Accenture, CSC, EDS, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, CGEY, Perot Systems, SchlumbergerSema and Tata Consulting.

BT won large contracts worth £1.65 billion for both the data spine and the London Region. Among the two contracts - the national ASP contract (for data spine, to set up and run the NHS Care Records Service) is worth £620 million and the London LSP (Local Service Provider) contract is worth £996 million over 10 years. The NHS Care Records Service to be delivered by BT will connect more than 30,000 GPs and 270 NHS trusts in a single, secure national system. By 2005 the ‘Data Spine’ is expected to be handling 8 billion transactions a year. For the London LSP contract, BT will design, deliver and operate an integrated local electronic patient records applications as well as systems for the whole London care community. IDX Systems is its preferred main clinical solution partner in London. IDX is already present in Chelsea and Westminster NHS Trusts and has recently been selected by University College Hospitals London NHS Trust. BT is already the NHS’s biggest IT and communications supplier with about £200 million of on-going business.

Accenture also won two large contacts. It won a £1.099 billion contract to install and run new systems in the North East, Yorkshire and Humber region and another contract for the East Midlands/East of England worth £934 million. Its main rival bidders were Cerner, CGEY and

The contracts will bring substantial business for Accenture and BT subcontractors including Oracle, Logica and Microsoft. BT has also started awarding subcontracts for the ‘Data Spine’. BT has awarded LogicaCMG a 10 year contract expected to be worth over £100 million to help design, deliver and manage the national patient record database. It has also awarded Sun Microsystems a 10 year contract. Sun will provide the software, Java systems, services, computer systems and storage systems. Other firms working with BT on the ‘Data Spine’ includes Oracle and Mastek.

CSC also won one of the remaining two LSP (Local Service Provider) contracts worth £973 million. CSC won the LSP contract for the North West/West Midlands against rivals BT, Fujitsu and IBM. The contract will run until 2013 and covers the provision of local systems and services to access and to use the NHS Care Records Service, provision of IT support at the local level, provide essential infrastructure and integration to existing systems in the NHS. CSC also has iSoft as its main partner. The principal CSC alliance members also include Hedra (change management specialist) and SCC (management services - Infrastructure and Desktop).

The award of the last LSP contract (for the south of England) is postponed until January 2004.

 

iSoft - the biggest winner, IBM - The biggest loser

A Summary of the NpfIT (National Program for IT) contracts are shown in Table 1. As can be seen, out of the four LSP contracts already awarded- iSoft will be the main application provider (clinical system provider) in three regions. The regions are in the North, the West and the East of England. Also given the close alliance of iSoft with Microsoft, it seems Microsoft will also be one of the main beneficiaries. This does not bode well for the main reason behind the NpfIT awards - which was to create competition and not a monopoly!! It will be interesting to see what sort of licensing agreements (especially applications) emerge in a few years time as well as how much ‘open-source’ software is present! It seems to TekPlus that more power in the future will be in the hands of the application providers/ LSPs and not the NHS.

The big loser so far has been IBM. IBM lost out both in contracts for the Data Spine as well as the contact for the LSP for the North West/West Midlands Region. Although having put in a substantial amount of money in bidding and a great deal of time they have ended up with nothing to show for. It seems difficult to justify what competition will be achieved if the largest Global IT- Services Company could not tender a competitive bid. This will be even more so if Cerner loses out on all contracts. (It is still present in bidding for the last award).