Into outsourcing

An IT outsourcing deal has saved three London NHS providers 25% on their IT costs and reduced complaints to nearly zero.

David Thomas, deputy director of IT for the NHS North Central London Cluster, says the bad old days of email going down for up to a week are gone since his organisation outsourced its desktop and server management and some network management services to 2e2.

The company has won three contracts with London organisations worth £4m over recent years, in what 2e2 says is one of the largest managed shared services offerings in the UK.

From in-house to out of house

Thomas first thought about an outsourcing deal when he was head of ICT at NHS Islington, which had a shared ICT service with NHS Camden and Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust.

In 2009, the group decided to look elsewhere because it was unhappy with the internal service, which Thomas says lacked structure, leadership and investment.

“Things had developed without any clear strategy, there was no road map, and keeping abreast of new technologies wasn’t happening,” he says.

The in-house service would regularly lose email for anything from one day up to one week, causing huge costs in terms of lost work hours.

The trusts decided to test the market through an OJEU tender and eventually signed with 2e2 to provide the service in December that year.

“Staff noticed the difference fairly early on,” Thomas says. “The number of complaints dropped, from quite a few right down to almost nothing, within the first three months.”

“We saw a reduction in the cost of running the service and an improvement in the service – that was not something we had necessarily expected at the outset,” he adds.

Costs were reduced by about 25%, with some of those savings reinvested in better IT kit. Thomas cannot give an exact figure, but says the saving was a “six-figure sum”.

Pulling in more organisations

After becoming deputy director of IT for the NCL Cluster – the commissioning arms of Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Haringey and Islington primary care trusts – he discovered the other organisations joining together were similarly dissatisfied with their internal IT service.

The cluster went to OJEU and 2e2 again won the contract, starting to provide the new service from June last year. Haringey Community Services (now part of Whittington Health NHS Trust) also tendered and signed a contract with 2e2.

“We have seen the benefits expected and experienced in Islington come to fruition across the cluster,” Thomas says.

He adds that it is convenient for a number of London services to be using the same managed ICT platform, as it gives them confidence that the information held at each site is well supported.

“We have an IT service that works and gives us peace of mind, that’s affordable and has some flexibility given what the future might hold,” he said.

“As the person responsible for IT services across the cluster, it gives me time to plan other things rather than worry about how the IT service desk might be responding.”

For the moment, each organisation retains a down-sized IT organisation that works on issues such as IT strategy and GP IT support.

“But there’s no reason why, in the future, we couldn’t look at asking an excellent service provider to manage the help desk for GPs,” Thomas says.

A new market for the future

About 30 NHS IT staff were transferred to 2e2 as part of the outsourcing deals, which saw the disaggregation of the Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Health Informatics Service.

Head of healthcare at 2e2, Adam Kamruddin, says it worked on a hub service model, with a significantly reduced IT team remaining on site while other staff were based at remote service centres.

In order to provide the service at scale, the company had to define a consistent package of services and service levels – such as management of the network server and desktop environment – but still remain flexible to different organisations’ needs, he adds.

The company hopes to sell its service to emerging clinical commissioning groups, which are already showing greater willingness than PCTs to look to the private sector for IT support and information analysis.

“There’s a lot of interest in what we are doing, particularly because many other trusts are in similar scenarios, with similar in-house IT service arrangements.

“Some of these trusts and organisations are no doubt rethinking their strategies going forward,” Kamruddin anticipates.