‘Thoughtful’ work needed on NHS, says Accenture

Accenture, the local service provider (LSP) for the North-east and Eastern regions of England, has told analysts that its NHS contracts are on track for delivery, although "thoughtful" deployment of the systems will be necessary for success.

In its previous quarter report released in April, Accenture said that, if it could agree revised deployment plans with the NHS, it expected $110m-$150m losses on its NHS work in the 2005 financial year, lower losses in 2006 and stabilisation and profitability in 2007.

The company confirmed to analysts last week that it had finalised deployment plans with the National Programme for IT for 2005. No further information or detail was made available about the plans, however, chief operating officer, Stephen Rohleder, told analysts that work was now underway to agree a deployment plan for 2006 as soon as possible.

Rohleder reiterated that statement to analysts: "We’re sticking to the assumptions that we’ve made for 2006 to be an improvement over 2005. And frankly, 2007 to be an improvement over that."

Answering questions from analysts about the NHS contract performance, he said: "There is a number of dependencies on delivery of those systems. Not the least of which is the readiness of the authority and the users to accept that.

"We have technical constraints. We have people that we have to train. So we want to deploy the systems in a thoughtful way, so that they’re accepted by the users."

Rohleder added that Accenture was balancing speed of delivery with the need for success, and that user acceptance of the deployment was going "very well".

Overall, in its third quarter report for the 2005 financial year, net revenues for the whole company totalled $4.08bn (£2.32bn), a result that Accenture bosses said was its best to date

Bill Green, CEO of Accenture, said: "I am pleased to tell you, number one, we are on top of our contracts at the National Health Services in England, and stand by our previous outlook."