NPfIT to be cut by £1.8 billion

Health secretary Andrew Lansley has confirmed that around £1 billion savings will be delivered to the NHS from CSC’s contract for the North, Midlands and East of England.

Speaking at the launch of the EHI CCIO Leaders Network, he also said that around £1.8 billion of savings would be made on the cost of the National Programme for IT in the NHS as a whole.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health Informatics Directorate confirmed to eHealth Insider this morning that the £1.8 billion figure included “back office” savings on the cost of running the programme and other national contracts, as well as the CSC deal.

Some of this money has already been included within earlier announcements on savings on the national programme.

In the last days of the Labour government, health secretary Andy Burnham announced that £600m would be cut from the programme as part of a budget deal with the Treasury.

The present government announced in September 2009 that a further £700m would be cut, with £200m of this coming from CSC’s deal.

The DH spokesperson said more detail about the savings and where they were coming from would be released once a final deal with CSC was signed-off at the end of the month.

The company told its US investors earlier this month that it had signed a ‘non binding letter of intent with the DH’ to agree a new deal, after almost a year of tortuous negotiations.

The company has been in talks with the DH about a new deal since Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust, the fourth, crucial, ‘early adopter’ for the Lorenzo electronic patient record system, pulled out of the programme in April last year.

The statement to investors says that as part of the agreement, the company expects to be contracted to deliver further Lorenzo implementations “adding to the 10 deployed successfully to date.”

Asked whether the DH was sure that there was still a demand for the electronic patient record in the NME, the spokesperson told EHI that was “working with current figures” although they declined to go into details about how these have been obtained.

At the EHI CCIO Leaders Network launch, Lansley was asked by Joe McDonald, NHS Connecting for Health’s national clinical lead for mental health, whether mental health trusts in the NME would get Lorenzo. Lansley replied: “I hope you will have access to Lorenzo, and other systems too.”

However, the DH spokesperson declined to answer questions about whether CSC would be given a deal in which it deployed Lorenzo and other systems to the region.

Some mental health trusts are already tendering for their own systems. Pennine Care itself is one of a number of trusts using a framework contract tendered by NHS Shared Business Services to procure systems.

The procurement is likely to see Lorenzo turned off at its first early adopter, NHS Bury, EHI reported last week.

Watch Andrew Lansley’s speech at the launch of the EHI CCIO Leaders Network on YouTube.