CSC launches products outside NPfIT

CSC has announced a new suite of products that it will roll out separately to its work for the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

The products to be marketed directly to the NHS include a new clinical information portal, an electronic patient folder and self-service kiosks.

CSC is the local service provider for the North, Midlands and East of England, responsible for delivering the iSoft Lorenzo CRS. 

The company says clinical information portal is designed to bring together all available patient information into a single point, while the electronic patient folder (ePF) digitises patient records so they can be shared in real time.

Andrew Spence, CSC’s UK director of healthcare strategy, said the products have been designed to address political demands for greater efficiency savings and to improve patient safety. 

“To rise to these policy challenges… trusts are realising that they have to look at new ways of working, and that technology is key to that. That is why CSC developed solutions that focus on increasing efficiency, reducing costs and managing risk,” he said.

The company says it is in discussions with potential customers for each of the new solutions, which ar the first of a number of healthcare technology and business solutions that it will launch over the coming months.

Spence told E-Health Insider: “We will work on new solutions with pilot customers first to prove the new solutions. Once the pilot projects have gone live and the lessons learned CSC will then make the products available quickly for at-scaled deployment.

“For example, with ePF a ‘proof of solution’ has now been successfully completed with our charter customer, and following clinician and other user feedback, a number of enhancements are now being incorporated into the scalable solution.”

Last year, in an interview with Spence, EHI revealed that CSC was working on developing a range of solutions, some in partnership with NHS Connecting for Health that focused predominately on interoperability.

Spence said that the developing products would not conflict with the Lorenzo electronic patient record that it is due to deploy under NPfIT, as they were deisgned to provide a more coherent view of data and not to be transactional.

Asked how the launch of the new solutions fits with the ongoing LSP negotiations and the recently announced £500m budget cuts to NPfIT, Spence said that the two were “unrelated given that the products have been in development for the last 12 plus months.”

He added: “These new solutions are separate from our work on the National Programme for IT. They are part of our UK Healthcare portfolio of offerings and are available to all healthcare businesses across the UK from CSC, not CfH/NPfIT.

Link: CSC

Opinion and Analysis: Interview with Andrew Spence.