Norway signs €90m deal with IBM

The Central Norway Regional Health Authority has signed a deal worth almost €90m (£75m) with IBM for IT systems to support reporting of health information, logistics and finance across all of the country’s hospitals.

Under the national framework agreement,  covering over 40 hospitals, IBM will provide enterprise resource planning software from Germany’s SAP to run Norwegian hospitals’ finance and logistics, information integration, management, operations, maintenance systems over the next four years.

Robert Tickell, IBM’s UK director for healthcare told E-Health Europe: “We’ve done a lot of work in a number of countries with SAP particularly around the HR and the payroll side, already SAP is widely used in Spain and Germany so it’s great to extend it further to the Nordics.”

IBM will provide its integrated healthcare platform, which is built on open standards and a common design, in order to integrate information from various systems into one to allow better collaboration and reporting among health authorities and the government.

Bård Helge Hofstad, director of project management and staff at Central Norway Regional Health Authority, said: “This is a good fit for us. The current ERP [enterprise resource planning] system is outdated and will be phased out within a few years and is therefore not maintained and upgraded to the necessary extent.

“A joint logistics and financial solution has the goal of better management of information and reporting, and opportunities for follow-up both within and between health regions. The solution will also enable efficiency through common standardised work processes and codes, as well as contributing to reduced costs and increased reliability through a common administration.”

Norway’s Ministry of Health and Care Services chose Central Norway regional Health Authority to lead the procurement on behalf of all the health regions in the country and will be the first region to adopt the solution starting with Østfold Hospital in South East Norway.

The company competed against Accenture with its Oracle solution, and with Nordic company EDB Business Partner ASA and won the tender earlier this month.

The company also said that the new ERP system will make it easier for Norway to create and deploy a national electronic patient record system, which it hopes to bid on when the tender is put out.

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