NHS contractor BT Capital Care Alliance and software
supplier IDX have successfully rolled out a new patient
administration system at Queen Mary's Sidcup NHS
Trust.
The system is the first that Connecting for Health, the NHS
agency which manages the £6.2bn national programme for IT, has
delivered in London after more than a year of delays.
The deployment will give BT some breathing space. In October,
Connecting for Health chief executive Richard Granger told
Bloomberg news service that BT's performance at Queen Mary's would
be an indication of whether the supplier had its NHS contract under
control.
The IDX system has already proved difficult to implement in some
NHS hospitals. Earlier this year, Fujitsu, the local service
provider for the southern region of the NHS national IT programme,
cancelled its contract with IDX after it failed to successfully
roll out the technology in any hospitals.
Granger had already reduced payment to BT for delays on a
separate NHS contract to build a broadband network. In July he
warned that "predictable events would occur" if it did not get some
substantial functionality from IDX before the end of the
summer.
This was widely interpreted as a threat to cancel BT's contract
for London.