The Scottish health service has signed a £300m IT
services contract with a consortium led by Atos Origin, which will
cover the roll-out of Scotland's Emergency Care Summary
system.
The consortium, which includes BT, IBM and Sopra Newell &
Budge, will provide NHS Scotland with its principal IT services for
11 years from April 2007, along with some local services to the 14
Scottish NHS boards.
The contract - negotiated through the NHS National Services
Scotland agency - will cover infrastructure services, datacentre
services, security management, business continuity, helpdesk
services and first-line application support. It will support local
and national clinical and business systems, including cancer
screening systems and NHS Scotland's payroll system.
The Scottish NHS has also recently opened a new £7m secure
datacentre in Livingston, which will house the patient data needed
for NHS Scotland's Emergency Care Summary system.
The Scottish care summary system is set to run on a different
basis to the electronic care record service at the heart of the
English NHS £12.4bn National Programme for IT.
The Scottish Executive has opted to create brief electronic
summaries of basic patient information that might be needed in an
emergency, such as drug allergies.
NHS Scotland staff are required to ask patients for permission
to access their electronic files (unless they are unconscious) and
patients can opt out of the electronic summary.
More information
www.nhsnss.org