Fujitsu Alliance wins the South

On January 26th the Final LSP contract for the South of England was announced and awarded to The Fujitsu Alliance for £896 million. The contract for the NHS Care Records Service (NHS CRS) covers Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire and the isle of Wright, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Somerset and Dorset, Avon Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Devon and Cornwell is the largest in England and has been awarded under the NPfIT programme and is due to run until 2013. It will cover almost one quarter of England’s population benefiting nearly 13 million patients. The cluster will cover some 256,000 NHS staff across 7 strategic Health Authorities, 81 Primary Care Trusts, 48 Hospital Trusts, 12 Ambulance Trusts and 1,938 GP practices.

The Fujitsu Alliance which consists of IDX Systems, Tata Consultancy Services and PricewaterhouseCoopers now also includes BT. Fujitsu will provide systems and services as well as local IT Support and infrastructure connecting to the spine. Tata Consultancy Services, which has a good reputation in Healthcare and has good IDX know-how, will probably lead in providing programming resources for clinical implementation and data migration. PricewaterhouseCoopers is tasked with providing the training. BT will be providing the system integration skills.

The rival bidders who have lost in the south are the SchlumbergerSema/Cerner alliance and the PlexusCare (EDS/LogicaCMG/ iSoft) alliance.

 

TekPlus Comment:

It seems that BT’s partnership so late in the process sealed the deal. BT, which already partners with IDX Systems for another cluster, would have happily seen advantages in joining. For one, there will benefit from the integration work, which will be linking into the BT spine and for another it solidifies their partnership with IDX - which would have been isolated if it had only won one of the areas. Cerner, which was at one time thought to be well positioned to win a couple of Clusters has ended up with none and this will be a great loss, given that the main intention of the NpfIT was to introduce competition.

TekPlus believes that more competition would have been achieved, by involving a number of more vendors with the added advantages of competitive newer solutions and technologies. With two clinical application vendors there seems a greater risk of longer term tie-in for the NHS to expose itself to as does the risk of going with BT both for the SPINE, for one of the main clusters (LONDON) and for the largest regional cluster (The South). In reality a lot will focus on how well the integration takes place, how well primary care is facilitated and how well new dynamic services are introduced via open standards and at reasonable prices.

TekPlus believes that the early bid winners had an advantage in bidding for the last cluster as they could see the potential benefits in economies of scale while the losers could not see advantages of pricing very low just for one cluster. Smaller clusters were worn with higher bids and it seems from talking with the LSPs that bids for the south were extremely squeezed to win the contract. No doubt this will be a benefit in the short term, however it seems that the decision is primarily been made on cost and not on overall functionality, multi-vendor integration or the best of breed systems.

TekPlus has spoken to a number of local IT managers as well as the vendors involved. It seems the first thing needed is for most of them to speak to each other and erode the emerging hostility. The second is to make clear the contracts, the allocation of responsibilities and the SLAs. Finally Pressure needs to be put on the LSPs to involve as many vendors down the line as possible.

The NHS infrastructure will be a lot healthier if more competition is involved at the lower levels. A case in point is both with the integration and the databases. We know of InterSystems that already has a good integration product called Ensemble which we believe was tested in the sandpit and connected well with both iSoft, the BT Spine, Cerner in Billing and GP systems. We expect there are numerous other similar players (Misys, SeeBeyond, EMIS,etc) with very good technology that need to be considered. The best technology will make the systems an envy of the world, but if the LSPs only upgrade whilst still keeping the legacy systems and not introduce new integrated solutions similar to Soarian solutions from Siemens, it would mean that we don’t get value for money.

Finally when talking about value for money, NPfIT has signed a licensing agreement with Oracle that will provide the NHS with access to Oracle products at up to 50 % below list price. This seems a good deal on the face of it but given that Larry Ellision last week was quoted as saying that the best pricing model is the employee-based pricing model, We do hope this will not be applied to counting all the employees of the NHS! Oracle is looking at a new system of pricing - away from per-processor to per-employee, this although would be the right scheme in certain circumstances does not seem right in TekPlus’s opinion for the NHS and lets hope this is not the case here.

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