Bacon presses Connelly on NPfIT deals

Conservative MP Richard Bacon has asked further searching questions about the value for money and future take up of systems under the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

In a 13 January letter to Christine Connelly, the Department of Health’s director general for informatics, he asks her to “confirm or comment” on a series of points relating to the value of the programme.

His questions focus on: the current child and community procurement using ASCC in the South of England; the reduced scope and delivery of re-negotiated local service provider contracts in London and the North, Midlands and East of England; and the likely level of take-up of the Lorenzo electronic patient record in the NME.

Bacon questions whether suppliers have been deterred from participating in the ASCC child and community health procurement due to “onerous” requirements and “untenable terms and conditions” which bias the process in favour of existing lead suppliers to the programme.

He asks Connelly: “Is it correct that suppliers able to deploy systems at a fraction of the cost of the LSP solutions have not been given a fair opportunity to compete?”

He also asks for indicative pricing submitted for ASSC for acute and community trusts.

Bacon asks why trusts outside the South have managed to deploy the RiO community and mental health system system for as little as £500,000, while under BT’s contract for the region each RiO site will cost up to £9m.

He adds that Cerner Millennium EPR deployments outside the programme appear to have cost far less than those within it and says “how can this difference in price be justified?”

Bacon’s latest letter reiterates his assertion that the BT contract for the South is poor value for money, and should actually be priced at around £100m rather than £546m.

In addition, he says that the latest LSP re-negotiation with BT cuts £112m off the firm’s London LSP deal but delivers around half of the original contract.

Moving to the government’s contract with CSC to provide Lorenzo to the NME, he questions whether the LSP and the product’s supplier, iSoft, will receive “substantial payments even if in practice NHS trusts choose alternative products?”

Bacon’s questions follow an exclusive story by eHealth Insider in November that indicated that while trusts were telling NHS Connecting for Health they might take Lorenzo in the future, they were actively investing in other systems and had little commitment to it.

As a result, the numbers likely to take the system could be far lower than the DH is assuming.

In his latest letter, Bacon asks Connelly to “agree that there is good reason to think that many fewer trusts in will in practice agree to take the system.”

Over the last year, Bacon has repeatedly pushed for the National Audit Office to carry out an investigation into the value of the NPfIT.

Last month, the NAO announced it would launch an investigation focusing specifically on the £546m contract that was awarded to BT last year to provide RiO to 25 sites in the South as well as Cerner to four greenfield sites (now three) and support Cerner in eight (now seven) sites.

Bacon also makes some specific requests in his latest missive to Connelly, including asking her to undertake a “specific review of the costs of running the Cerner Millennium system over a traditional PAS in Taunton; and the costs of running Lorenzo over normal PAS in Morecambe Bay.”

He also asks why Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust has recently gone live with a patient administration system from IMS Maxims when it has contracted to implement Cerner Millennium.