The Department of Health has announced a £300m update to the NHS's
human resources and payroll systems.
A consortium, headed by McKesson HBOC, and including Oracle,
PricewaterhouseCoopers and IBM, is the preferred supplier for the
system, Oracle HRMS. The 10 year contract is due to be signed in
September, with implementation scheduled for April 2002.
Philip Hewitson, chief executive of NHS Shared Services, said,
"This provides us with a common system for staff recruitment and
management." The system will integrate HR and payroll and
eventually include electronic self-service and remote access, he
said.
The NHS uses more than 30 different systems for its 1.2 million
staff in England and Wales. The Government hopes to have the
integrated system in place by mid-2004, despite a three-month delay
earlier this year.
The deal is part of the Shared Services Initiative launched in
October 1999 to make better use of NHS resources. Hewitson said,
"The NHS recruits 275,000 staff a year in England and Wales, about
200,000 of whom already work in the NHS." The system will transfer
their details and let managers get on with their jobs, he said.
Presently, many staff details are being re-keyed.
Industry experts have welcomed the move, but Murray Bywater,
managing director of IT healthcare specialist Silicon Bridge
Research, said, "In theory the NHS can achieve great economies of
scale with a centralised HR and payroll system but it will be very
complex to implement because they have a lot of people working in
diverse environments."
The system's success depends on the service's ability to enforce
standard HR business processes, he said.
But NHS managers, are concerned that the system will reduce local
control.
A spokesman for the NHS Confederation said, "Unhappy experiences of
large, centralised IT projects show they can be expensive,
unresponsive and inflexible." But health service officials deny
suggestions that the new system is designed to take control away
from local managers. Hewitson said, "It is a system for local
management and it will be managed locally."
IT project problems have dogged the NHS. In the early 1990s a
centralised approach to rushed IT delivery hit the Hospital
Information Support Systems initiative, losing up to £103m and
prompting criticism from the Commons Public Accounts Committee.
System proposals
- New NHS HR and payroll system announced in 10-year deal, worth
up to £300m
- Consortium headed by McKesson HBOC with Oracle, IBM and
PricewaterhouseCoopers named as preferred supplier
Guest editor's opinion
- Creating shared service centres is a tried and tested solution
to eliminating data and systems duplication; and we all want
efficient "joined-up" government IT systems
- Such a long-term investment in database technology should be
maximised by creating a centre of excellence, so that skills and
knowledge gained over the life of this project is leveraged by
other government departments. Local authorities, for example, could
learn from this project
.
James Rogers
james.rogers@rbi.co.uk