National Scottish NHS IT procurement begins

 The National Health Service for Scotland has begun re-tendering exercise for end-to-end delivery of its principal IT services, in a procurement designed to meet the services’ evolving national and local business and clinical requirements.

The contract notice includes provision for the future development of a national NHS Scotland Electronic Patient Record, and other future developments such as "a move towards 24×7 support for critical applications and a national GP desktop delivery mechanism".

IT services being tendered for divide into ‘core’ and ‘additional’ services. Core services include: infrastructure and associated services; data centre services; security management; business continuity; help desk; and first line application support.

Systems to be supported include national administration systems including Scotland’s Community and Preventative Care systems, such as child screening, and Community Health Index. NHS Scotland’s national payroll system will also have to be supported as well as the national clinical SCI store.

The contract notice makes clear that requirements are expected to change dramatically over the course of the life of the contract, and anticipates that additional administration and clinical systems will need to be hosted and supported over the contract period.

Additional services listed in the contract notice include: development of national systems to meet future integration needs; consultation services to meet new developments; provision and development of software developments, "potentially including Electronic Patient Record".

The current contract for NHS Scotland’s national IT services provider, currently held by Atos Origin, expires in March 2007. In 1999 NHS Scotland awarded a five-year IT contract to Sema Group which was extended by two years in 2001. Sema were taken over by Schlumberger, who in 2003 were then acquired by Atos Origin.

The new National IT Services contract is due to commence in October 2006 ahead of the new service arrangements coming into effect April 2007.

The initial contract notice in the Official Journal of the European Union, does not put a value on the contract but invites potential suppliers of the services to indicate their interest by completing a Pre-Qualifying Questionnaire

Contract notice

http://www.show.scot.nhs.uk/itcontract/advert.pdf