BT and
Accenture have won contracts worth £2.7bn from the Health Service's
National Programme for IT.
BT has been
awarded the £620m contract for the NHS Care Record Service, a
national electronic patient record, which is at the heart of the
National Programme. The telecoms giant has also won the Local
Service Provider contract for London in a deal worth £996m.
Accenture has been
confirmed as the Local Service Provider for North East England,
including Yorkshire and Humberside, in a contract worth almost
£1.1bn.
The
contracts follow October's £64.5m award for the national Electronic
Booking Service to SchlumbergerSema.
The three
remaining Local Service Provider contracts will be awarded later
this month or in the new year, the Department of Health said.
The contracts have
been agreed despite the fact that the DoH does not know the cost of
changing working practices that the new technology will require to
be used effectively.
The British
Computer Society’s Health Informatics Committee warned that costs
of critical business and other changes could exceed by four to
eight times the £2.3bn allocated to the national programme for IT
by the government.
It added that the
national programme will “require unprecedented business process
re-engineering in order to deliver”.
In an interview
with Computer Weekly, Mark Outhwaite, lead for the national
programme at the Modernisation Agency, part of the DoH, said, “We
have not worked out how much money is needed. We will decide the
implementation plan,” after the contract award.