CSC, Accenture win NHS Care Records contracts

Four down, one to go

By Drew Cullen • Get more from this author

Posted in Hardware, 6th January 2004 21:44 GMT

Free whitepaper – Cooling strategies for ultra-high density racks and blade servers

The government today named Accenture and CSC as the winners for separate IT contracts to manage the NHS Care Records service.

CSC has scooped up the contract, worth £973m, to manage the North West and West Midland region, while Accenture has won the Eastern region, worth £934m.
CSC's junior partners are Hedra, iSOFT and SCC.

In an earlier round of contract awards, Accenture won the North East, while BT - a big surprise, here - emerged as the Local Service Provider for London. We infer that Accenture's team for the Eastern region will be similar to the consortium it led in winning the North East region, comprising BT, Microsoft and iSOFT.

So that's four LSP franchises down, just one - the so-called Southern cluster - to go. The Department of Health aims to announce the winner in January. All contracts run until 2013.

The NHS Care Records Service is due to go live in late 2004. It's a huge gig, connecting 30,000-plus GPs and 270 NHS trust in a single national system. This will supply NHS patients - all 50 million of them - with their own electronic care record which will follow them as they navigate their way around the health and social care systems. The aim is to get the right information to healthcare professionals when they need it.

And the patients will benefit too, obtaining more efficient healthcare and "gaining access to more comprehensive information to help them make choices and will eventually be able to access their own health records", says Health Secretary John Reid. ®